MODERNISM AND THE POLITICS OF TIME:

TIME AND HISTORY IN THE WORK OF H. G. WELLS, D. H. LAWRENCE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF

David Shackleton,

St Catherine’s College.

D.Phil. Thesis Submitted for Examination, Trinity Term 2014.

Modernism and the Politics of Time: Time and History in the Work of

H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

David Shackleton, St Catherine’s College

D.Phil. Thesis Submitted for Examination, Trinity Term 2014

This thesis argues for a revised understanding of time in modernist literature. It

challenges the longstanding critical tradition that has used the French philosopher

Henri Bergson’s distinction between clock-time and durée to explicate time in the

modernist novel. To do so, it replaces Stephen Kern’s influential understanding of

modernity as characterized by the solidification of a homogenous clock-time, with

Peter Osborne’s notion of modernity as structured by a competing range of

temporalizations of history.

The following chapters then read the fictional and historical writings of H. G. Wells,

D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf alongside such a conception of modernity, and

show that all these writers explored different versions of historical time. Wells

explored geological time in The Time Machine (1895) and An Outline of History

(1920), Lawrence adapted Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence in

Women in Love (1920), Movements in European History (1921) and Lady

Chatterley’s Lover (1928), and Woolf imagined an aeviternal historical continuity and

a phenomenological historical time in Between the Acts (1941).

By addressing historical time, this thesis enables a reassessment of the politics of

modernist time. It challenges the view that the purported modernist exploration of a

Bergsonian private time constitutes an asocial and ahistorical retreat from the

political. Rather, by transferring Osborne’s notion of a ‘politics of time’ to the literary

sphere, this study argues that the competing configurations of politically-charged

historical time in literary modernism, form the analogue of the competing versions of

such a time within modernity, emblematized by the contrasting accounts of historical

time of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing a thesis about time and modernism has taught me many things. For instance, I

have learnt that the paradoxes of time and motion are all a scam, and that the tortoise

does not, in fact, beat Achilles. However, while the course has been long, it has also

been rewarding, and I am very grateful to those who have helped me along the way.

For their financial support that has made this thesis possible, I am very grateful to the

Arts and Humanities Research Council for an AHRC Studentship Award, and to St

Catherine’s College for a Graduate Scholarship (Arts). I have greatly enjoyed being

part of the welcoming community at St Catherine’s College. The Meyerstein Special

Research Fund at Oxford University and the Graduate Research Expenses Fund at St

Catherine’s have generously helped me to present my research at Bristol, London,

Dublin and Prague.

I was very lucky to have Michael Whitworth as a supervisor for this thesis. I am very

grateful to him for being such an astute and conscientious reader, for pointing my

research in fruitful directions, and for his continued support. I would also like to thank

Michael Sayeau and Jeri Johnson for their help and guidance at early, formative

stages of this project. Similarly, for their wisdom and generous suggestions at various

later stages, many thanks to Finn Fordham, Keith Williams and Wim Van Mierlo. For

their invaluable feedback on the various chapters that were foisted upon them, many

thanks to Lisa Coutras, Julie Taylor, Alys Moody and Caroline Shackleton.

Finally, for their friendship and for their advice on matters pornosophical and

philotheological, I would like to thank Carla Neuss, Robert Rapoport, Oren

Goldschmidt, David Soud, Camilla Mount, Becky Roach, Lialin Rotem-Stibbe,

Calum Mechie, Michelle Witen and Luke Williamson. Most of all, for their

encouragement during the slow crawl to the finish line, thank you to Lisa and to

Anne.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements iii Introduction: Modernism and the Cult of Time 1

Modernism and the Cult of Time 2 Modernity and the Politics of Time 19 Beyond Bergson: Historical Time in Wells, Lawrence and Woolf 30

Time and Narrative 38 Part 1: H. G. Wells, Geology and the Abyss of Time 54 1.1. The Time Machine (1895) and the Ruins of Time 60

Geological Time Travel 65 Romantic Ruins 76 Literary and Geological Fragments 94 Cosmic Pessimism 102

1.2. Deep History and Wells’s Politicization of Geological Time 112 Beyond Cosmic Pessimism 115 The Shape of Deep History 127 Geological Time and Narrative 142 Deep Time, Transnationalism and the Politics of Progress 154 Part 2: D. H. Lawrence and Nietzsche’s Thought of Eternal Recurrence 172 2.1. Cyclical History 173 The Politics of Eternal Recurrence 176 Lawrence’s Conception of History 183

Women in Love (1920) and ‘the problem of industrialism’ 196 Gerald Crich and eternal recurrence 206

2.2. The Revaluation of the Earth 221 The Historical Scheme of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) 224 The Environmental Politics of the Lady Chatterley Novels 236 Assessing Lawrence’s Green Politics 246 Part 3: Virginia Woolf and the Pageant of Mutabilitie 256 3.1. The Pageant of Mutabilitie 264 Spenser’s and Woolf’s Pageants 265 The Aevum 272 Gender and the Politics of a Changeless Nature 279

Theatre, Epic and Bourgeois 287 3.2. The Historical Time of Miss La Trobe’s Pageant 299 Phenomenological Time 301 Time and Community 309 Repetition in History 313 3.3. Historicality and the Politics of Time 321

The Temporalization of History as Tradition 325 Anti-Authoritarian Forms of Tradition 334 Tradition and Politics at Pointz Hall 338

Conclusion 349 Bibliography 361

INTRODUCTION: MODERNISM AND THE CULT OF TIME

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‘Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated.’

Giorgio Agamben1

Modernism and the Cult of Time

In Time and Western Man (1927), Wyndham Lewis delivered a polemic against what

he saw as a ‘time cult’ in the arts of his day. His central argument was that an

obsession with time had developed in philosophy and the sciences, principally

through the philosophy of Henri Bergson and the science of Albert Einstein, and that

this obsession had influenced literature and the arts, resulting in the ‘literary pre-

occupation with Time’ of artists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude

Stein. Philosophy and literature, he contended, have been marked by a ‘glorification

of the concept Time’, which on both planes resolves itself into a ‘cult of Time’.2

Lewis attributed this pervasive fascination with time to the ‘philosophy of

psychological time’ of Henri Bergson.3 Bergson first expounded this philosophy in his

Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), in which he adumbrated

the pivotal distinction between ‘two possible conceptions of time’: durée and clock

time.4 Durée is an inner duration involving qualitative succession which arises from

‘the melting of states of consciousness into one another’, whereas clock-time, a

‘spurious concept’ resulting from ‘the trespassing of the idea of space upon the field

1 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum’, in Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 89-106, 89. 2 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 205-6. 3 Lewis, Time, 84. 4 Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Alcan, 1889); all references here will be to F. L. Pogson’s English translation of 1910: Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910).

3

of pure consciousness’, is a form of ‘homogenous time whose moments are strung on

a spatial line’.5 Lewis singled out Bergson’s ‘Doctrine of Time’ as ‘the creative

source of the time-philosophy’, and claimed that from ‘the birth of Bergson to the

present day, one vast orthodoxy has been in process of maturing in the world of

science and philosophy’.6 He portrayed Einsteinian physics as an important later

articulation of this time-philosophy, asserting that the ‘philosophy of the [einsteinian]

space-timeist is identical with the old . . . bergsonian philosophy of psychological

time’ or ‘durée’.7 Of course, audaciously to align Bergson’s durée with the space-time

of Einsteinian physics is to ignore the marked differences between the two, brought

out when Bergson and Einstein met at the Société française de philosophie in Paris in

1922 to discuss the meaning of relativity, and reflected in Bergson’s Duration and

Simultaneity (1922).8 Undeterred by such differences, Lewis instead stressed the

homogeneity of the philosophical time-doctrine, proclaiming to have found ‘the same

unanimity rampant throughout the contemporary theoretical field’.9 Further, Lewis

claimed that Bergson had a profound influence on the literature of his day. ‘Without

all the uniform pervasive growth of the time-philosophy starting from the little seed

planted by Bergson’, he claimed, ‘there would be no Ulysses, or there would be no A

5 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 100, 107, 237. For a recent exposition of Bergson’s distinction between durée and clock-time, and of his time-philosophy more generally, see Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006). 6 Lewis, Time, 158, 84. 7 Lewis, Time, 84. 8 On the similarities and differences between Bergson’s philosophy and the philosophy implied by Einstein’s special theory of relativity, including a discussion of Lewis’s treatment of the two in Time and Western Man, see Michael Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 190-4. For an account of the ‘bitter dispute’ between Bergson and Einstein, see Jimena Canales, ‘Einstein, Bergson, and the Experiment that Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations’, Modern Language Notes, 120/5 (December 2005), 1168-91. 9 Lewis, Time, 206.

4

La Recherche du Temps Perdu. There would be no “time-composition” of Miss

Stein’.10

Since Lewis’s study, the dominant critical approaches to time in what has become

known as modernist literature have been Bergsonian. As Adam Barrows observes,

Lewis’s ‘allegation that the writers now considered canonical modernists were slavish

devotees of the temporal philosophy of Henri Bergson has stuck fairly well in the

collective critical consciousness’.11 In their most general form, such critical

approaches see within modernist literature the exploration of a private, psychological

time, very similar to that which had been philosophically articulated by Bergson.

Early studies, such as those of Shiv Kumar and Margaret Church, drew parallels

between Bergson’s philosophy of time and modernist literature.12 For example,

Kumar in Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962) held that Bergson’s

‘durée or psychological time . . . becomes the distinguishing feature of the stream of

consciousness novel’, whose central exemplars are the novels of Dorothy Richardson,

Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.13 According to Kumar, these novels deploy

innovative new formal techniques to explore their protagonists’ ‘stream of

consciousness’, which is to be understood as a Bergsonian (or Jamesian) flux of

conscious states; the novel thereby conveys or represents the flow of a Bergsonian

psychological time, as it is experienced by the novel’s characters.14

10 Lewis, Time, 87. 11 Adam Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 55. 12 Shiv Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (London: Blackie, 1962); Margaret Church, Time and Reality: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963). 13 Kumar, Stream of Consciousness, 17. 14 In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James advanced an account of ‘the perception of time’ based around the specious present, in which new objects enter consciousness through expectation, and fade into memory. Memory and expectation, the ‘retrospective and the prospective sense of time’, in turn ‘give that continuity to consciousness without which it could not be called a

5

Whereas Kumar aimed to ‘bring out the parallelism between the notion of stream of

consciousness as it appears in [Woolf, Joyce and Richardson] and the Bergsonian

concept of flux’, later critics such as Paul Douglass, Tom Quirk, Mark Antliff, Mary

Ann Gillies and Hilary Fink all sought to establish concrete instances of Bergson’s

influence on modernism.15 For example, Gillies in Henri Bergson and British

Modernism (1996) charts the reception of Bergson’s philosophy in Britain, and offers

Bergsonian readings of writers such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce,

Dorothy Richardson and Joseph Conrad. While she argues that many aspects of

Bergson’s philosophy influenced British modernists, her Bergsonian readings draw

heavily on his philosophy of time: for example, she argues that Woolf ‘was

preoccupied with [Bergson’s] opposition of durée and l’étendu’, that Joyce’s

‘fictional worlds are very much based in durée, because his primary focus is the inner

world’, and that Richardson’s technique in Pilgrimage (1915-67) involves placing

‘the reader within durée, while at the same time using the more conventional external

time to form the novel’s framework’.16 Recently, Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and

Laci Mattison, the editors of Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism

stream’ (The Principles of Psychology, i (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 606-7). Kumar sees James’s and Bergson’s accounts of time and consciousness as articulating, in a complementary manner, the philosophical basis of the so-called modernist ‘stream of consciousness’ novel (Stream of Consciousness, 13-4). 15 Kumar, Stream of Consciousness, viii. Paul Douglass, Bergson, Eliot and American Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986); Tom Quirk, Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996) and Hilary Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900-1930 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999). See also Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (eds), The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 16 Gillies, Bergson, 134, 135, 153.

6

(2013), have reiterated the importance of Bergson’s thought for modernism, and have

called for a ‘return to Bergson’.17

A Bergsonian understanding of time in the modernist novel has also, as Barrows

makes clear, informed a long-standing critique of aesthetic modernism from the left,

which stems from György Lukács and Raymond Williams.18 Most importantly,

Lukács criticised the modernist writers’ supposed exploration of a Bergsonian

‘subjective time’ as part of his wider critique of the ideology of modernism in The

Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1955).19 Lukács shares with Lewis the view that

Bergson articulated the modern conception of time—he holds that other philosophers

simply ‘took up and varied this theme’—and that this conception of time ‘soon made

its appearance in literature’.20 For Lukács, the modernist literary exploration of a

Bergsonian subjective time forms part of what he sees as modernism’s ideologically

retrograde asocialism and ahistoricism. His favoured realist novels, such as those of

Honoré de Balzac and of Thomas Mann, portray their protagonists within society at a

given moment of history: they are thus situated within the ‘objective time’ of history

and historical change.21 (The value of such realist novels, on Lukács’ account, is that

they then permit a social and political critique of the historical and social reality

which they represent). By contrast, modernist writers’ portrayal of a subjective time,

in which the individual turns away from society and retreats into his or her own

consciousness, forms part of the modernists’ view of ‘man’ as ‘by nature solitary,

17 Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 6. 18 Barrows, Cosmic Time, 12. 19 György Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), 37-9. 20 Lukács, Realism, 37. 21 Lukács, Realism, 38.

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asocial, unable to enter into relationships with other human beings’.22 Moreover, by

fetishizing a subjective time, modernist novels lose sight of the objective time of

history: ‘by separating time from the outer world of objective reality, the inner world

of the subject is transformed into a . . . flux and acquires—paradoxically as it may

seem—a static character’.23 Though ostensibly being about time and flux, the

modernists’ celebration of a Bergsonian subjective time, by forsaking the objective

historical time of the realist novel, forms part of what Lukács calls modernism’s

‘static approach to reality’, and its denial of history.24

On a more deeply entrenched theoretical level, Stephen Kern has used Bergson’s

philosophy of time to provide master-concepts with which to theorize time in

modernism and modernity in his hugely influential The Culture of Time and Space,

1880-1918 (1983). Kern argues that the period from 1880 to the outbreak of the First

World War ‘created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time

and space’.25 He gives an account of how a vast array of technological innovations

such as the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile and

airplane, and of how cultural developments such as the stream of consciousness

novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity, changed conceptions of

time and space in this period. However, his overarching narrative account of the

period implicitly accepts and reproduces the Bergsonian distinction between public

and private time.26 On Kern’s account, the introduction of World Standard Time at the

end of the nineteenth century ‘created greater uniformity of shared public time’,

22 Lukács, Realism, 20. 23 Lukács, Realism, 38. 24 Lukács, Realism, 34. 25 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918: With a New Preface (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1. 26 See Barrows, Cosmic Time, 9-11.

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against which emerged the literary and cultural ‘explorations of a plurality of private

times’ that were the ‘historically unique contributions of the period’.27 Overall, for

Kern, the ‘thrust of the age was to affirm the reality of private time against that of a

single public time and to define its nature as heterogeneous, fluid and reversible’.28

Kern’s narrative of the period therefore inscribes the changes in the experience of

time and space within an essentially Bergsonian distinction between private and

public time, and understands literary modernism as affirming a private temporal

experience in the face of a superficial public sphere.

Subsequent studies, such as those of Randall Stevenson and Ursula Heise, have

retrenched Kern’s implicitly Bergsonian approach to time in modernism. Stevenson’s

account of time in Modernist Fiction (1992/1998) and related articles is particularly

instructive (and problematic), because it purports to downplay the importance of

Bergson while, following Kern, theoretically elevating Bergson’s distinction between

private and public time to stand as the overarching opposition of the era.29 As part of

his assessment of Lewis’s Time and Western Man, Stevenson criticises the

preeminent importance which Lewis ascribed to Bergson’s philosophy. Lewis’s

contention that Bergson instituted one ‘great orthodoxy’ of time-philosophy is,

Stevenson points out, ‘simply wrong’, and his argument that the widespread

contemporary fascination with time could be attributed to Bergson’s influence

27 Kern, Time and Space, 33, 313-4. For example, Kern holds that Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and James Joyce all wrote literary works which explored ‘[t]he heterogeneity of private time and its conflict with public time’ (16-8). 28 Kern, Time and Space, 34. 29 Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 2nd edn (London: Prentice Hall, 1998); ‘A Narrow, Zigzag and Secluded Path: Conrad, Clockwork, and the Politics of Modernism’, in Andreas Fischer, Martin Heusser and Thomas Hermann (eds), Aspects of Modernism: Studies in Honour of Max Nänny (Tübingen: G. Narr, 1997), 33-52; ‘Greenwich Meanings: Clocks and Things in Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (2000), 124-36.

9

borders, he suggests, on the level of a ‘conspiracy’ theory.30 More importantly,

Stevenson advances deep-seated theoretical reasons why Lewis’s influence-approach

is unsatisfactory. The issue of time in literature cannot simply be a question of

philosophy’s influence on literature, or even a question of a reciprocal influence;

rather, the issue has to be related to a wider set of ‘contemporary social, political and

economic conditions’, or to conditions of modernity.31 Drawing on Kern’s cultural

history, Stevenson provides a by-now familiar litany of contexts in which to read

modernist time: new organizations of time brought about by the conditions of factory

labour in industrialized capitalist society, shaped by factors such as the ritual of

‘clocking-in’ and ‘clocking-out’, as well as by Taylorism and scientific management;

the spread of railways and the institution of a homogenous nationwide ‘Railway

Time’ to replace local time zones; the establishment of world standard time, centred

on Greenwich, through the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884 and

the International Conference on Time in Paris in 1912.32 However, following Kern, he

theoretically unites these diverse contexts in an overarching narrative of the formation

of a homogenous public time. If anything, Stevenson’s time of ‘public life’ is more

malign than Kern’s public time: it is the time of dehumanizing factory routine, of

imperial domination, and of synchronized death in the trenches.33

Reading the public/private distinction back into modernist literature, Stevenson (again

following Kern’s example) holds that modernist writers reacted against pernicious

public time by affirming private time. He complies lists of examples to confirm his

30 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 111, 115. 31 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 117, 13. 32 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 117, 120-1, 122-3. Compare Ursula Heise’s summary of the factors which brought about a ‘revolution in the awareness of space and time’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 33-4). 33 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 128, 118, 127.

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argument that modernists disliked ‘time on the clock’: Gudrun’s horror at the

‘twitching of the hands of the clock’ in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920);

Bernard being upset by ‘the stare of clocks’ in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928);

Quentin smashing the glass of his watch and tearing off the hands in William

Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929).34 Correlatively, Stevenson argues,

modernists affirmed ‘time in the mind’: central examples here are Marcel Proust’s use

of memory as ‘an essential structuring device’ in A la recherhe du temps perdu (1913-

27) and the ‘freewheeling movements of Molly Bloom’s mind’ in the last episode of

James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), both of which, he argues, show ‘modernism freeing

narrative as far as possible from time on the clock’.35 What justifies Stevenson’s

wholesale interpretation of time in modernist literature in Bergsonian terms is not the

fact that Bergson influenced modernist novelists (as Wyndham Lewis and Mary Ann

Gillies argued), but rather the fact that modernist novelists (and philosophers such as

Bergson) were reacting to the same set of social and economic conditions, which

happen to be theorized in terms drawn from Bergson’s philosophy.36 Bergson’s

distinction between private and public time begins to appear obvious, inevitable, and

ideologically-neutral. As one critic puts it, the distinction between private and public

time becomes ‘utterly naturalized’.37

34 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 88, 90. 35 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 96, 104, 128. 36 See Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 128. 37 Jesse Matz, ‘Hulme’s Compromise and the New Psychologism’, in Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek (eds), T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 113-31, 113. Ursula Heise, in Chronoschisms (1997), also accepts and reproduces Kern’s model of time in modernism, which she uses as a foil to contrast time in postmodernism. Notably, as with Stevenson, Bergson’s distinction between private and public time is completely naturalized, and Bergson is listed as just one of a number of other thinkers, alongside Sigmund Freud, William James, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who were all supposedly interested in ‘the nature and working of private temporality’ (36).

11

In general, since Kern’s study, it has become standard practice to theorize time in

modernity and modernism through Bergson’s distinction between private and public

time. For example, Pericles Lewis reiterates what have become critical commonplaces

when he claims that modernity is characterised by ‘the sense of a division between the

time of private experience and the time of public life’, and that ‘modernists were

fascinated with the disjunction between internal and external time’.38 As Barrows

points out, it ‘has now become virtually impossible to think of modernist time outside

of the contexts of Bergson’s philosophy and Kern’s social history’.39

However, there are serious problems with the dominant Bergsonian approaches to the

issue of time in modernism. To remain within the contexts of Bergson’s philosophy

and Kern’s cultural history is detrimental, as critics such as Mark Hama, Jesse Matz

and Adam Barrows have pointed out. It tends to reduce the many different forms of

time and temporality in the modernist novel to a homogenous exploration of ‘private

time’. Hama has drawn attention to the limitations of ‘the critical tendency to view

time in the modernist novel almost exclusively in Bergsonian terms’, and shows how

it has obscured temporal complexity in the case of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

(1907).40 Matz argues that the ‘utterly naturalized distinction between private and

public time’, the demonization of ‘all public temporalities’, and the lumping ‘very

different kinds of temporal experiment together into the category of private time’, has

‘led to serious misunderstandings and underestimations . . . of modernist

38 Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12, 161. Compare Ann Banfield’s similar claim that ‘[m]odernist time-thinking manifested an increasingly marked dualism: a disjunction between public/objective and private/subjective time’ (‘Remembrance and Time Past’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, ed. Morag Shiac (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 48-64, 48). 39 Barrows, Cosmic Time, 9. 40 Mark Hama, ‘Time as Power: The Politics of Social Time in Conrad’s The Secret Agent’, Conradiana, 32/2 (2000), 123-43, 124.

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temporalities’.41 Barrows points out that the Bergsonian critical tradition has ‘led us to

ignore the full range of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist

engagements with temporality’.42 These problems are most acute in the work of critics

such as Stevenson and Heise who adopt Kern’s theoretical framework. Stevenson

objected to Lewis’s contention that Bergson instituted one ‘great orthodoxy’ in the

time-philosophy of his day, yet is himself guilty of projecting a far greater

homogeneity into modernist literature by holding that it is united in a common project

of resisting time on the clock and exploring time in the mind.43 Evidence of the same

homogenizing tendency is apparent in Heise’s work when, in the course of a single

sentence, she asserts reductively that the novels of Proust, Mann, Joyce, Svevo,

Woolf, Faulkner, Stein and many others ‘testify’ to the fact that ‘the temporal

operations of the human mind and its potential conflicts with the linearity of public

time became one of the most persistently recurring topics’ in the modernist novel.44

This thesis will contest the dominant critical narrative of modernism’s affirmation of

a private, Bergsonian time-consciousness. It will do so by arguing that H. G. Wells,

D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf all explored varieties of a different sort of time in

their fictional and historical writings: historical time, or time which underpins various

conceptions of history. This modernist exploration of historical time has hitherto been

largely occluded by the critical preoccupation with Bergsonian durée. By rendering a

version of modernism which affirms the individual experience of a private,

psychological time, Bergsonian approaches have overlooked the communal and

historical aspects of modernist temporality. The inadequacy of such approaches in

41 Matz, ‘Hulme’s Compromise’, 113-4 42 Barrows, Cosmic Time, 10. 43 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 111. 44 Heise, Chronoschisms, 36.

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relation to the question of historical time is evident in the work of Stevenson and

Heise. In Modernist Fiction, Stevenson addresses the crisis of the First World War,

which brings his discussion of time in modernism to the level of ‘the evolution of

history itself’.45 Led by a generalization of his guiding Bergsonian distinction

between time in the mind and clock-time to the level of historical time, he argues that

history appeared in either one of two forms to modernists as well as to ‘the age as a

whole’: either as continuous flow, or as discontinuity and fragmentation.46 Following

Kern, he argues that through its enormous violence the First World War extinguished

‘a sense of integration in the flow of time’: ‘[r]upturing the sense of the stream of

time’, the First World War added to the tendency ‘to conceive time as divided or

fractured rather than . . . seamlessly flowing’.47 Correlatively, Stevenson finds two

possibilities for modernist narrative in the aftermath of the First World War: narrative

‘could in various ways reproduce the fragmented, discontinuous aspect of

contemporary history’, as in Lawrence’s Women in Love, or fiction ‘could try to

smooth over or escape from the cracks and chasms in contemporary life through

streams of consciousness, recovered memories, and loops in time’.48

However, such a dualistic treatment of historical time is unsatisfactory. It is not the

case that modernists conceived of historical time in only two possible ways. The

various conceptions of historical time which writers such as Wells, Lawrence and

Woolf espoused cannot be forced into a simple binary opposition between fragment

and flow, an oversimplification underpinned by the Bergsonian distinction between

clock-time and durée.

45 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 141. 46 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 128. 47 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 145, 147. Compare Kern, Time and Space, 288-9. 48 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 157.

14

Heise’s approach to historical time is equally unappealing. While she does gesture

towards ‘the cyclical or spiral patterns of history and the recurrence of archetypes that

many modernist texts foreground’, these are firmly encased within a dualistic

Bergsonian opposition, and are held to be alternatives to explorations of private time

as means of resisting ‘the linearity and mechanicity of standardized time’.49 By

contrast, this study will argue that the work of Wells, Lawrence and Woolf displays

far richer and more varied explorations of historical time than the reductive and

distorting portrayals which Bergsonian approaches have allowed. Conversely, by

drawing attention to these varieties of historical time, I hope to challenge the

adequacy of the Bergsonian framework for addressing the question of modernist time.

By drawing attention to modernist varieties of historical time, I also aim to challenge

an important corollary of the Bergsonian view—that the modernist concern with time

involves a retreat from the public sphere—and on this basis to argue for a revised

understanding of the politics of modernist time. Bergsonian approaches have led to a

widespread view of modernist time as involving a retreat from the public sphere, and

with it from material and political concerns. Such a view follows in part from the

(arguably) reactionary nature of Bergson’s philosophy, and his advocacy of an

introspective retreat into the realm of durée in his Essai. Therein, Bergson contrasted

‘two different selves’, one of which is ‘the external projection of the other, its spatial

and . . . social representation’; the other, more fundamental self is connected to durée

and is therefore ‘free’. To achieve ‘freedom’, Bergson advocated an introspective

49 Heise, Chronoschisms, 36.

15

retreat from the ‘automated, external world’ into the depths of consciousness.50 Such

introspection involves turning away from social and political concerns: it is what

Barrows calls ‘a reactionary retreat from the muck and grime of the spatial public

realm’.51

The modernist concern with time, understood as the literary exploration of a

Bergsonian interior time, has likewise been portrayed as complicit in a retreat from

the public realm both by studies of influence such as that of Gillies, and by Kern’s

cultural study. Typically, for example, in her Bergsonian reading of Dorothy

Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Gillies contends that ‘Richardson was less concerned with

the external world than she was with the inner one’, and that in the novel ‘society is

less important than Miriam’s inner life’.52 Similarly, Kern’s study portrays the

modernist exploration of Bergsonian private time as a reactive retreat from the public

sphere and from modernity. Thus Stevenson, having inherited Kern’s framework,

characteristically contends that modernist narratives ‘turn away from the reifying

pressures of modern life towards more inviolate inner states of consciousness’.53

The view that modernist time involves a Bergsonian retreat from the public realm has

in turn led to two main interpretations of the politics of that time. The first stems from

Lukács’s critique of the politics of modernism, and his charge that the modernists’

exploration of a subjective time, in which ‘the individual [retreats] into himself in

despair at the cruelty of the age’ where he ‘may experience an intoxicated fascination

50 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 231-3. 51 Barrows, Cosmic Time, 12. Jane Goldman similarly remarks sceptically that Bergson ‘locates “freedom” in subjective intuition’ which ‘remains cut off from the spatial, material and historical “real world”’ (The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4). 52 Gillies, Bergson, 151-2. 53 Stevenson, ‘Greenwich Meanings’, 131.

16

at his forlorn condition’, forms part of an ideologically retrograde asocial and

ahistorical modernism.54 Lukács’ critique has contributed towards the common view

of modernist temporality as what Barrows calls a ‘reactionary cultural formation’,

expressing ‘a deliberate retreat from crassly material or “political” engagements’.55

The second type of interpretation finds a more politically salutary aspect in the turn

away from the public realm, and discovers in the supposed introspective plunge into

the realm of durée an act of political resistance. Perhaps the most sophisticated

version of this argument is given by Stevenson in ‘A Narrow, Zigzag and Secluded

Path: Conrad, Clockwork, and the Politics of Modernism’ (1997).56 Therein,

Stevenson seeks to counter Lukács’s charge that the modernists’ exploration of

subjective time constitutes a ‘[denial] or [evasion] of the pressures of contemporary

history which writers should have addressed’, and to recover a ‘more worthwhile and

politically responsible’ role for modernist fiction.57 ‘Modernist fiction’s zigzag forms

and structures can be seen’, argues Stevenson, ‘as acts of resistance to the new

stringencies of time’s rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’.58 By

claiming to find ‘resistance within the form of fiction’, Stevenson invokes what

Jacques Rancière calls one of the ‘great politics of aesthetics’: the ‘politics of the 54 Lukács, Realism, 38. Similarly, within Woolf studies, Goldman has leveled a critique of Bergsonian readings of Woolf (rather than of Woolf’s writings themselves), arguing that they tend misleadingly to present Woolf as apolitically divorced from ‘the historical’ and from ‘“the real world”’ (Feminist Aesthetics, 4). 55 Barrows, Cosmic Time, 4. 56 An alternative, feminist version of this argument finds in the retreat into feminine durée an act of resistance to the masculine external world. For example, Gillies finds in Richardson’s plunging ‘her reader into the depths of Miriam’s durée’ a way of ‘creating a distinctly feminine reality’, and a deliberate attempt to ‘rid herself of a dominant, controlling, masculine view of the world’ (Bergson, 155). Goldman is sceptical about parallel arguments in the sphere of Woolf studies, suggesting that as well as relying on problematically ‘gendered metaphysical dualisms’, they tend to neglect rather than establish the feminist import of Woolf’s writings (Feminist Aesthetics, 4). On the political aspects of the gendering of Bergsonian durée within the period, see Anne Fernihough, ‘“Go in Fear of Abstractions”: Modernism and the Spectre of Democracy’, Textual Practice, 14/3 (2000), 179-97, 493-4. 57 Stevenson, ‘Secluded Path’, 50. 58 Stevenson, ‘Secluded Path’, 50.

17

resistant form’. Such an aesthetics, which are best exemplified by those of Theodor

Adorno, ‘[enclose] the political promise of aesthetic experience in art’s very

separation, in the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form of life’.59

Indeed, Adorno had opposed Lukács’s understanding of the politics of modernism in

his review of The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Therein, he criticised Lukács’s

commitment to a form of mimetic realism, or his restriction of literature ‘to the

imitation of empirical reality’, on the grounds that it misapprehended the constitutive

formality of the artwork.60 Instead, Adorno argued that through its form, the

modernist artwork achieves an ‘“aesthetic distance”’ from existence’ that confers on

the artwork the ability to stand as a critique of that existence.61 Opposing Lukács’s

position in a manner very similar to that of Adorno, Stevenson mobilises a defence of

the politics of modernist time in the spirit of an aesthetics of resistant form. Resistant

form, for Stevenson, means the often complex narrative form through which

modernist novels explore the ‘elaborate architectures of consciousness and

memory’.62 Elsewhere, Stevenson celebrates the modernists’ pursuit of ‘temporal

autonomy’, a term derived from Gérard Genette which refers to the capacity of

narrative to depart from a chronological ordering of events, and which becomes

emblematic for Stevenson of modernist narrative’s capacity to resist the dictates of

homogenous public time.63 Such ‘temporal autonomy’, silently echoing Adorno’s

‘aesthetic autonomy’, comes to stand as a locus for the modernists’ political acts of

resistance. Stevenson’s reading converts ‘reaction’ into ‘resistance’: the formal

59 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 44. 60 Theodor Adorno, ‘Reconciliation Under Duress’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 151-76, 154. 61 Adorno, ‘Duress’, 160. Adorno hints at insufficiencies in Lukács’s treatment of the ‘controversy about time triggered off by Bergson’, and refers condescendingly to his preference for ‘objective time’ (171). 62 Stevenson, ‘Secluded Path’, 50. 63 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 95.

18

complexity of modernist fiction in its exploration of private time is seen as part of a

politics of resistance against late capitalism and the depredations of the public sphere.

However, because both Lukács’s and Stevenson’s arguments rely on flawed

Bergsonian presuppositions, neither of their interpretations of the politics of

modernist time is tenable.64 Taking historical time into account reveals that modernist

time does not involve a Bergsonian retreat from the social and historical. While

Bergsonian approaches have led to a longstanding critical misrepresentation of the

political dimensions of modernist time, abandoning a Bergsonian picture both allows

and necessitates a reassessment of the politics of modernist time.65 This study will

argue that Wells’s, Lawrence’s and Woolf’s various explorations of historical time

carry divergent politics, and indeed that these explorations form sites of political

contestation.

Once the question of the politics of modernist time is freed from a Bergsonian

framework, it is no longer the case that this question can be answered in advance for

all modernists. It is an indication of the homogenising effect of Bergsonian

approaches that Lukács and Stevenson were able to attribute a uniform politics of

time to all modernist writers. This homogenizing tendency is particularly evident in

Stevenson’s work, when he contends that identifying resistance through the form of

their fiction helps to establish the same ‘progressive political orientation’ for authors

64 I agree fully with Barrows when he writes that the ‘political dimensions of modernist temporality have been misrepresented in a long-standing critical tradition that equates modernist time with the private, interior, and purely aesthetic pleasures of the Bergsonian durée’ (Cosmic Time, 8). 65 Barrows calls for a reassessment of the politics of modernist time in Cosmic Time (4). While this study contributes towards such a reassessment through consideration of historical time, Barrows’ approach is to resituate the modernist experiments with the representation of time in the context of the political and legislative battles over world standard time. In doing so, he argues that what is fundamental is not the Bergsonian tension between public and private time, but the tension between national and global time (7).

19

such as Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, ‘[r]egardless of their

explicit politics’.66 It is precisely the assumption that all these authors were engaged

in the same project of exploring a Bergsonian subjective time which allows a blanket

reading of their politics of time, and leads to an erasure of their salient political

differences. By contrast, in this thesis, I will argue that the different forms of

historical time within modernism support a divergent range of politics. Conversely, I

will suggest that the politics of modernism can be rethought productively through the

politics of time.

Modernity and the Politics of Time

In The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995), Peter Osborne has

argued that the question of modernity is principally one concerning time, and more

specifically, of the temporalization of history.67 He draws on Reinhart Koselleck’s

study of the semantics of historical time to support this position. Koselleck, through

his reconstructions of the semantic prehistory of ‘Neuzeit’ (literally, ‘new time’), a

German term for modernity which is found in its composite form only after 1870,

shows the lived time-consciousness of late nineteenth-century European metropolitan

modernity—the temporality of Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert, Georg

Simmel and Walter Benjamin’s modernity—to be an intensified social embodiment of

a form of historiographic consciousness which had been developing in Europe for

some time.68 Osborne develops Koselleck’s connection between the temporal form of

experience which constitutes modernity and a form of historiographic consciousness,

66 Stevenson, ‘Secluded Path’, 50, my emphasis. 67 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995). 68 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); see Osborne, Politics of Time, 9-13.

20

to argue that modernity contains not just one form of temporalization of history, but a

struggle between competing forms. Modernity, he claims, ‘contains a range of

possible temporalizations of history within its fundamental, most abstract temporal

form’.69 For Osborne, this range of possible forms of historical consciousness is

emblematized by the competing accounts of historical time found in the work of

Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, which in turn form part of what Jürgen

Habermas has called ‘the philosophical discourse of modernity’.70 Osborne contends

that ‘the differences between the forms of temporality at stake in Benjamin’s and

Heidegger’s work may be emblematic of the extent to which modernity contains a

range of possible temporalizations of history’, and that ‘the idea of a competition or

struggle between the different forms of temporalization . . . leads to the idea of a

politics of time’.71

In this thesis, I will use Osborne’s model of modernity to replace that of Stephen Kern

as a framework within which to pursue the question of time in modernism.72 That is, I

will replace Kern’s notion of modernity as characterized by the solidification of a

homogenous public time with Peter Osborne’s notion of modernity as characterized

by a competing range of temporalizations of history. I will also use Osborne’s

recognition that there was a range of competing theoretical accounts of time within

the period as a corrective to the view, shared by Lewis and Lukács, that the time-

philosophy of the day was homogenously Bergsonian, or, as Lewis put it, that there

69 Osborne, Politics of Time, 116. 70 See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). 71 Osborne, Politics of Time, 116. 72 Bergsonian approaches are most difficult to resist in Kern’s framework, because the distinction between public and private time is so deeply theoretically entrenched; critics working within this framework need not establish the fact of Bergson’s influence on any given writer to justify their use of Bergson’s terms as critical concepts. Consequently, to contest Bergsonian approaches, it is most pressing to challenge this framework.

21

was ‘the same unanimity rampant throughout the contemporary theoretical field’.73

Finally, given the inadequacy of the existing Bergsonian approaches to the issue, I

will transfer Osborne’s notion of a ‘politics of time’ from the theoretical to the literary

sphere as an alternative means of pursuing the question of the politics of modernist

time.74 Overall, I will argue that Osborne’s idea of a struggle between forms of

temporality within modernity is matched by a homologous contestation of forms of

temporality within literary modernism, as exemplified by the varieties of historical

time found in the work of Wells, Lawrence and Woolf. First, however, I will set out

in more detail the essential contrast which Osborne draws between Benjamin’s and

Heidegger’s accounts of temporality.

As Osborne makes clear, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin advanced very

different accounts of temporality. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger argued that

the ordinary conception of time, which sees time as a linear series of ‘nows’, and has

been dominant from Aristotle to Bergson, hides the true nature of temporality. In the

second division of Being and Time, he advanced a hierarchically-ordered conception

of three different forms of temporality: within-timeness (Innerzeitigkeit), historicality

(Geschichtlichkeit), and ecstatic-horizonal temporality (Zeitlichkeit).75 By contrast, in

his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), Benjamin contrasted ‘homogenous,

empty time’ with a conception of an explosive historical time—‘Jetztzeit’, or ‘now-

time’—as part of his materialist conception of history.76 Whereas historicism, he

73 Lewis, Time, 206. 74 While there are other political aspects of modernist time, such as those addressed by Barrows in Cosmic Time, I will focus on the ‘politics of time’ in Osborne’s narrower sense of a ‘politics of historical time’ (Politics of Time, viii, emphasis added). 75 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 76 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 245-55. On Benjamin’s Jeztzeit and his materialist conception of history, see also his ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ (1937), trans. Howard Eiland and Michael

22

contended, operates with a conception of homogenous empty time, the historical

materialist ‘establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” [Jetztzeit]

which is shot through with chips of Messianic time’.77 Heidegger, Benjamin and

Bergson were thereby all united in their rejection of a very similar conception of time

as a linear series of homogenous ‘nows’: Heidegger called this conception of time

‘the traditional conception of time’; Benjamin called it ‘homogenous, empty time’;

and Bergson called it ‘clock time’. However, these three thinkers counterposed very

different conceptions of temporality to such a homogenous time.

The accounts of time put forth by Heidegger, Benjamin and Bergson are competing

accounts. In a note to Being and Time, Heidegger remarked that ‘Bergson’s view of

time . . . has obviously arisen from an Interpretation of the Aristotelian essay on

time’.78 In this respect, Bergson’s approach resembles that of Heidegger, who offered

his account of ecstatic-horizonal temporality as part of an ‘existential-ontological

interpretation of Aristotle’s definition of “time”’ in Physics 4.79 However, unlike

Heidegger’s account of ecstatic-horizonal temporality, Bergson’s account of durée

supposedly failed to go beyond the traditional conception of time, a failure which is

reflected in Heidegger’s comment that the ‘traditional concept of time’ has ‘persisted

from Aristotle to Bergson and even later’.80 Again, Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit

W. Jennings, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap Press, 2002), 260-302; ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”’, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap Press, 2003), 401-11; and ‘Convolute N’, in The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap Press, 2002), 456-88. 77 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 255. 78 Heidegger, Being and Time, 500. 79 Heidegger, Being and Time, 473. 80 Heidegger, Being and Time, 39. Heidegger similarly suggested in his History of the Concept of Time (1925) that Bergson attempted to go beyond the traditional concept of time to a ‘more original’ one but failed, and so remains traditional (History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore J.

23

differs markedly from both Bergson’s durée and from Heidegger’s hierarchically-

ordered levels of temporality. In particular, as Osborne points out, Benjamin was

‘consistently scathing about Heidegger’s work’.81 As early as 1916, he judged the

published text of Heidegger’s lecture, ‘On the Concept of Time in the Science of

History’ (1915), to show ‘precisely how this subject should not be treated’, while in

1930 he wrote to Gerhard Scholem of his (never-realised) plan to ‘annihilate’

Heidegger ‘in the context of a very close-knit critical circle of readers’, led by himself

and Bertolt Brecht.82

Osborne’s notion of a struggle between different forms of temporalization of history

is best illustrated by the difference between Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s conceptions

of historical time, which in turn underpin antagonistic conceptions of history. Osborne

draws attention to the ‘uncanny convergence’ between Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s

views on historical time, pointing out that both are critics of historicism, and for

broadly similar reasons, and that both their alternatives rely upon the interruptive

force of some notion of the ecstatic.83 Yet this convergence only serves to heighten

the difference between their respective conceptions of historical time and of history.

Benjamin himself drew attention to this difference, when he wrote in a letter to

Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 9). As Osborne points out, Heidegger had intended to devote a section of his lectures on the ‘History of the Concept of Time’, held during the summer semester at the University of Marburg in 1925, to Bergson’s theory, but only got so far as writing an outline of his position (Politics of Time, 214). 81 Osborne, Politics of Time, 176. 82 Letters to Gerhard Scholem on 11 November 1916 and 25 April 1930, in Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 82, 365; see Osborne, Politics of Time, 238. 83 Osborne, Politics of Time, 175.

24

Scholem that he expected to see ‘sparks fly from the clash’ between his and

Heidegger’s ‘two very different views of history’.84

Heidegger advanced his account of historicality (‘Geschichtlichkeit’) in the fifth

chapter of the second division of Being and Time.85 Paul Ricoeur usefully summarises

three main traits of historicality: first, time appears at this level as ‘extended’ between

birth and death; second, in historicality, priority is given to the past in the structure of

care that underlies the unity of the three dimensions of time (the three ‘temporal

ecstases’); and third, through the structure of ‘repetition’ (Wiederholung), the

character of time is rooted in the deep unity of time as ‘future’, ‘past’, and ‘present’.86

Repetition underpins what Heidegger calls ‘authentic historicality’, as the repetition

of past possibilities of being. 87 Such a repetition is described by Heidegger as

occurring in a ‘moment of vision’ (Augenblick) which ‘deprives the “today” of its

character as present’; history is then understood as ‘the “recurrence” of the

possible’.88 Heidegger contrasted such an authentic form of historicality with an

inauthentic form, in which ‘one’s existence . . . is loaded down with the legacy of a

“past” which has become unrecognizable’.89

Benjamin’s account of Jetztzeit differs markedly from Heidegger’s account of

historicality.90 Whereas Heidegger had temporalized history as tradition or ‘handing-

84 Letter to Gerhard Scholem, 20 January 1930; Correspondence, 359. On the differences between Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s conceptions of historical time, see also Howard Caygill, ‘Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction of Tradition’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 1-31. 85 Heidegger, Being and Time, 424-55. 86 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative Time’, Critical Inquiry, 7/1 (Fall 1980), 169-90, 180-2. 87 Heidegger, Being and Time, 436. 88 Heidegger, Being and Time, 443-4. 89 Heidegger, Being and Time, 444. 90 Benjamin comments in the Arcades Project that ‘Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through “historicality”’ (462, translation modified).

25

down’, in which tradition establishes the continuity with the past that is a condition of

historical existence, Benjamin temporalized history as the destruction of tradition.91

As Howard Caygill puts it, ‘Benjamin emphasizes the destructive work of historical

time or tradition over Heidegger’s attempts to secure authenticity through it’.92

Jetztzeit is a destructive and revolutionary temporality: it forms part of a ‘historical

materialism’ which is ‘directed towards a consciousness of the present which

explodes the continuum of history’.93 Benjamin describes it as ‘the moment of

awakening’ which ‘rescues’ history from the present, ‘ignites the explosives that lie in

the past’, and ‘blasts the epoch’ out of the reified continuity of homogenous time.94 In

place of the historicist notion of the historical progress of humankind, which ‘cannot

be sundered from the concept of its progression through homogenous, empty time’, he

put forward the revolutionaries’ ‘awareness that they are about to make the continuum

of history explode’.95

Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s competing forms of historical time carry conflicting

politics. This contrast is reflected biographically in these thinkers’ starkly opposed

personal political commitments: Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism, and

Benjamin’s to communism. While Heidegger’s notion of ‘authentic historicality’ has

been defended and rehabilitated from within a tradition of left-Heideggerianism, it has

also been seen as the philosophical basis of Heidegger’s notorious support of National

Socialism in the early 1930s.96 On this interpretation, Heidegger’s portrayal of the

91 Osborne, Politics of Time, 115. 92 Caygill, ‘Destruction of Tradition’, 11. 93 Benjamin, ‘Fuchs’, 262. 94 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 263-5; see Osborne, Politics of Time, 144-50. 95 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 252, 253. 96 For an example of an attempt to rehabilitate Heidegger’s notion of authentic historicality, see Giorgio Agamben, ‘Time and History’. The tradition of left-Heideggerianism began with Herbert Marcuse’s Marxist interpretation of Heidegger’s thought in a series of essays dating from 1928-32,

26

coming together of a ‘community’ or ‘people’ to realize their ‘destiny’ [Geschick] in a

moment of authentic co-historizing, provides a philosophical model for the coming

together of the Völk in the National Socialist Revolution.97 For instance, Iain

Thomson claims that ‘[t]here can be little doubt that the concept of historicality

presented in §§72-7 of Being and Time provides the general philosophical framework

in terms of which Heidegger understood his decision to join the National Socialist

“revolution” in 1933’.98

Benjamin’s conception of Jetztzeit forms part of a politics antithetically opposed to

those of Heidegger. While Heidegger embraced National Socialism in the early

1930s, Benjamin’s political commitments were communist: his ‘Theses’, which were

written shortly before he committed suicide whilst fleeing Nazi-occupied France in

1940, are advanced as part of what they call ‘the struggle against Fascism’.99 Jetztzeit

is a disruptive temporality of revolutionary political opportunity: it is the form of

temporal awareness held by ‘the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action’.

Thus, for example, to Maximilien Robespierre during the 1789 French Revolution,

‘ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now [Jetztzeit] which he

blasted out of the continuum of history’.100 Moreover, Jetztzeit is to form the basis of

the historical materialist’s approach to history.101 The historical materialist exploits

Jetztzeit to ‘blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history’, in what is ‘a

which have been published in English translation as Heideggerian Marxism, ed. Richard Wolin and John Abromeit, trans. Richard Wolin et al. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). 97 Heidegger, Being and Time, 436. 98 Iain Thomson, ‘Heidegger and National Socialism’, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (eds), A Companion to Heidegger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 32-48, 35. The issue of the relationship between the concept of historicality in Being and Time and Heidegger’s political engagement with National Socialism forms one aspect of what has become known as ‘the Heidegger controversy’. 99 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 249. 100 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 253. 101 See Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill’, trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevere, in Benjamin, Arcades Project, 929-45, 941-5.

27

revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’.102 From the struggle between

Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s forms of historical time, Osborne derives the idea of

what he calls a ‘politics of historical time’, or more simply, a ‘politics of time’.103

As indicated above, I will replace Stephen Kern’s conception of modernity with that

of Osborne. That is, I shall read the work of Wells, Lawrence and Woolf alongside a

conception of modernity as containing a competing range of temporalizations of

history. To be clear, what is problematic about Kern and Stevenson’s approaches is

not the fact that they attempt to relate the issue of time in modernist literature to a set

of contemporary social, political and economic conditions: this undertaking is in itself

laudable. Rather, what is problematic is that they theorize these conditions with

concepts drawn from Bergson’s philosophy, and moreover, that they construe the

relation between modernism and modernity as a reactive one, in which aesthetic

modernism, with its affirmation of private time, is seen as a reaction to modernity and

its homogenous public time.104

102 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 254. 103 Osborne, Politics of Time, viii, 116, emphasis removed. Mark Antliff addresses the question of the politics of Bergson’s time in his Inventing Bergson: see in particular his epilogue, ‘The Politics of Time and Modernity’ (168-84). In part, Antliff shows how Bergson’s clock-time and durée were made to carry different politics as forms of historical time by members of the Parisian avant-garde. For example, Bergson’s symbolist followers criticised Charles Maurras and Action française’s logical analysis of history on the grounds that it denied the heterogeneous nature of historical time (22). Again, in his Reflections on Violence (1908), the revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel critiqued Karl Marx’s projected theory of revolution on the grounds that it employed a concept of homogenous time to make illegitimate predictions about the future. His preferred conception of history, in which historical myths such as that of the general strike play a key role, operated under a more Bergsonian conception of historical time (158). (Both are political re-applications of Bergson’s parallel critique of positivist forms of history in Creative Evolution (1907)). Bergson’s philosophy of time was thereby adapted to carry what Osborne calls a politics of historical time. 104 Critics such as Sara Danius and Mary Ann Doane have highlighted problems with Kern’s reactive model of the relation between modernism and modernity. For Danius, Kern’s discussion of private and public time in modernist art takes part in a larger (and problematic) movement in modernist studies in which modernism is seen as a reaction to modernity, paralleling, echoing or contesting its development (see The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 43-6). Doane points out that Kern’s elevation of the distinction between public time and private time to the reigning opposition of the era ‘perpetrates other, fairly intransigent oppositions: technology versus aesthetics, industrial capitalism versus the individual, the social versus the

28

Osborne’s model of modernity has several advantages over that of Kern. Firstly, it

does not use Bergson’s philosophy to theorize time in modernity. It does not reduce

all the changes in modernity to the formation of one ‘public time’, which can be

thought to coincide roughly with world standard time. Rather, Osborne’s theory

recognizes that there were a variety of competing accounts of time in the period, and

that no one can provide master-concepts to theorize the period itself.105 Secondly,

unlike Kern’s theory, it is not committed to a reactive formulation of the relationship

between modernism and modernity, in which aesthetic modernism is seen as a

reaction to the changes brought about in industrial modernity. Rather, the relationship

between modernism and modernity can be thought of as one that is, in Tim

Armstrong’s preferred formulation, ‘often homologous rather than antagonistic’.106

Thirdly, by recognizing a diversity of temporalities within modernity, it opens the

way for the recognition of a similar diversity of temporalities in literary modernism,

including a diversity of different forms of historical time. Literary modernism is no

longer constrained to be seen as a homologous exploration of psychological time, but

can be recognized as containing a range of sometimes conflicting times and

temporalities. And lastly, following from the previous point, Osborne’s notion of

modernity opens the possibility that these different forms of temporality within

literary modernism carry a divergent set of politics. It is not the case that all modernist

literary explorations of time, as homogenous explorations of psychological time, carry psychological’ (The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 236). See also Barrows, Cosmic Time, 16. 105 The substitution of Osborne’s model of modernity for that of Kern thereby removes the justification for reading the Bergsonian distinction between private and public time back into modernist literature on the grounds that it was the major structural opposition of the era. As a heuristic exercise, all the contexts which Kern identifies in his study could be re-described in terms drawn from Heidegger’s analysis of temporality in Being and Time. Such an exercise would have the advantage of ‘de-naturalizing’ Bergson’s distinction between private and public time, and of revealing the ideological charge which this distinction carries. 106 Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 1.

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the same political valence, but rather, the various forms of time within modernism can

carry different and often conflicting politics.

Ultimately, this thesis seeks to transfer Osborne’s notion of a politics of time to

literary modernism. Osborne shows that modernity was characterized by a competing

set of temporalizations of history; this thesis argues that there was a homologous set

of versions of historical time in literary modernism. That is, just as there are

competing versions of historical time within modernity (emblematized by those of

Benjamin and Heidegger), so there are competing configurations of historical time in

literary modernism (illustrated by those of Wells, Lawrence and Woolf). To map

Osborne’s notion of a politics of time onto the literary sphere, I will set up a structural

analogy between competing theoretical accounts of historical time, and Wells,

Lawrence and Woolf’s literary explorations of different forms of historical time. I do

not intend to suggest that Heidegger’s or Benjamin’s accounts of historical time

influenced Wells, Lawrence or Woolf. Indeed, they did not. However, I do mean to

suggest that Wells, Lawrence and Woolf explored and articulated different versions of

historical time in their fictional and historical writing which are analogous to those in

the theoretical sphere. More generally, I will throughout this study draw parallels

between debates concerning the politics of time in the theoretical sphere, and Wells’s,

Lawrence’s and Woolf’s explorations of different versions of historical time. For

example, in chapter 3.1 I will compare Woolf’s fictional imagination of a

phenomenological historical time in Between the Acts to Heidegger’s philosophical

account of historicality. By drawing such comparisons, I will use the well-established

critical debates about historical time in modernity to illuminate aspects of historical

time in literary modernism.

30

Beyond Bergson: Historical Time in Wells, Lawrence and Woolf

Transferring Peter Osborne’s notion of the politics of time to the literary sphere, this

thesis argues that H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf explored different

versions of historical time, which underpin contrasting conceptions of history, and

thereby carry very different politics. In turning attention away from a Bergsonian

psychological time to historical time, this thesis will move from the short time-spans

across which the individual life is lived, to long time-spans across which history

unfolds. Moreover, it will turn its attention away from individual to communal

temporal experience: away from private individual consciousness as the exclusive and

privileged site of temporality, to forms of time which can bring a community together

in a shared sense of time and history. Finally, it will move its focus from the sense or

meaning that arises from the pattern or shape of an individual life to the historical

meaning which arises from the pattern and shape of history.

In the first part of this study, I will address H. G. Wells’s exploration of geological

time in The Time Machine (1895) and his universal histories, The Outline of History

(1920) and A Short History of the World (1922). In chapter 1.1, by situating Wells’s

The Time Machine in the previously overlooked context of geological literature, I will

throw light on its central conceit of time travel, the ruined architecture of the future

age, and the work’s fragmentary aesthetic. Wells’s Time Traveller traverses a sublime

and inhuman geological time, whose nature is reflected in the fragmentary narrative

form of the romance. In chapter 1.2, I will explore how Wells’s treatment of

geological time changes markedly in his later writing. In his universal histories, he

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draws attention to the immense age of the universe and of the earth, but undertakes to

tell their story in one continuous narrative, with the help of two historiographical

models: Biblical history, and Immanuel Kant’s universal history with a cosmopolitan

aim. I will explore how this narrative organization humanizes geological time, and

how such a humanized historical time supported Wells’s political advocacy of a

cosmopolitan world state.

The second part of this study will examine D. H. Lawrence’s creative adaptions of

Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche’s thought of eternal

recurrence induces a rupture in historical time. It aims to effect a chronophilic

‘redemption of time’ in the face of a chronophobic Christian-Platonic tradition that

has devalued time and the temporal in contrast to eternity and the eternal. Indeed, the

thought’s transformation of the relation between time and eternity is so decisive that it

inaugurates a new historical age. Whereas previous history is the history of a

Platonism whose values have been devalued, leading to the historical crisis of

nihilism, the thought of eternal recurrence inaugurates a new, affirmative Dionysian

age, marked by the coming of the overman, and the joyful revaluation of all values.

I will address Lawrence’s various historiographical and literary adaptations of

Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence, placing these adaptations in the context of

contemporary philosophical interpretations of that thought. In Movements in

European History (1921), Lawrence plotted the story of European history as a

pseudo-Nietzschean historical cycle, and derived the imperative of a strong, Caesarist

political leader from this shape of history. By contrast, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover

(1928), Lawrence creatively adapted the thought of eternal recurrence in a less

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authoritarian manner. In this novel, Constance Chatterley rebels against her husband’s

oppressive Platonism in a manner which closely resembles Zarathustra’s overcoming

of Platonism through the thought of eternal recurrence. While Clifford’s pursuit of

Platonic beauty devalues the earth and constitutes what Zarathustra calls an act of

revenge on time, Connie’s sense of the ‘immortality of the flesh’ forms a chronophilic

redemption of time and the temporal. Connie and Mellors pursue a green Nietzschean

revaluation of the earth, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover thereby stands as a fictional

complement to recent readings of Nietzsche as a proto-ecological thinker.

The third part of this study turns to Virginia Woolf’s late writings, and in particular

her last novel, Between the Acts (1940). In a conscious departure from the long

tradition of Bergsonian readings of Woolf’s fictional experiments with time, I will

argue that Between the Acts is better seen as an exploration of an aeviternal historical

continuity and a phenomenological historical time. By drawing a parallel between

Miss La Trobe’s pageant and Mutabilitie’s pageant in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie

Queene (1609), I will elucidate the role played by the aevum—an order of duration

which lies between time and eternity—in Between the Acts. While the fantasy of an

aeviternally permanent nature is a comforting one for Lucy Swithin, this inherently

conservative temporal fiction carries a troubling politics, and is deeply problematic

from the perspective of both gender and class.

As well as conveying a sense of the aeviternal continuity of history, Miss La Trobe’s

pageant is accompanied by a phenomenological historical time. Drawing a

comparison between the historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant and Heidegger’s

account of historicality facilitates a new approach to the politics of tradition in

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Between the Acts and Woolf’s late writing. Both Heidegger’s and Woolf’s versions of

historical time are characterised by repetition, but whereas for Heidegger repetition

forms part of an authentic historical stance whereby a people are brought together as a

community and come into line with their historical destiny, for Woolf it forms part of

a vision of history as a nightmarish repetition of patriarchal violence and war.

What needs to be stressed is how greatly Wells’s, Lawrence’s and Woolf’s various

forms of historical time differ from a Bergsonian psychological time. The difference

is perhaps best illustrated by the case of the historical time of the pageant in Between

the Acts, whose passing is marked by the ticking of a gramophone. This historical

time of the pageant is a time of the mind, but unlike Bergson’s durée, it does not

involve an asocial retreat into the private sphere of consciousness. Rather, it is a

communal time that binds together the minds of the pageant’s audience in a shared

experience. Nor does it involve a retreat from history. Rather, it provides the

pageant’s audience with a shared sense of history. (In turn, the historical time of the

pageant belies Lukács’ reading of modernist time as asocial and as complicit in a

denial of history). Similarly, the aeviternity which co-exists with the historical time of

the pageant in Between the Acts is unrelated to Bergson’s philosophy: indeed, it has a

far older provenance, dating back to scholastic philosophy. The other forms of

historical time explored in this study—Wells’s versions of geological time, and

Lawrence’s versions of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence—similarly differ

greatly from Bergson’s conception of time.

Overall, my examination of Wells’s, Lawrence’s and Woolf’s conceptions of

historical time aims to motivate and contribute towards the wider project of the

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reassessment of the politics of modernist time. The humanized geological time of

Wells’s universal histories forms the backdrop to the common story of mankind,

which promises to undermine national differences and to unite mankind through a

shared historical sense, and thereby supports his political vision of a cosmopolitan

world state. Lawrence’s adaptations of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence carry

contrasting politics. In Movements, Lawrence drew from the pseudo-Nietzschean

cyclical shape of history the necessity for a strong, militaristic leader to unite Europe:

such a leader forms part of Lawrence’s notorious politics of leadership, and

anticipates his ‘leadership novels’ of the mid-1920s. By contrast, Lady Chatterley’s

Lover constitutes a more peaceful imagination of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal

recurrence, and issues in a vision of a green revaluation of the earth. The repetitive

temporality of the historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant in Between the Acts

provides a vision of history as the nightmarish repetition of patriarchal violence and

war, and intimates the dangers of tradition and authority as forms of historical

transmission. The fiction of aeviternal continuity in the same novel threatens to

petrify exploitative gender and class relations in a changeless nature with no prospect

of historical change. The different forms of historical time explored by Wells,

Lawrence and Woolf in the literary sphere contrast just as sharply as do Benjamin’s

Jetztzeit and Heidegger’s historicality in the theoretical sphere, and support a

similarly divergent set of politics.

I should point out that this thesis makes no claim to be an exhaustive study of

historical time in modernism. Rather, within literary modernism, I have restricted my

focus to narrative works, and specifically to novels and histories. I have focused on

narrative because, as Heise points out, it is the literary mode that is most directly

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dependent on its deployment in time, and where innovations in the representation of

temporality can be expected to play themselves out most visibly and with the greatest

impact on literary form.107 Theorists of narrative generally agree that time is one of

the most fundamental parameters through which narrative is organized and

understood.108 More specifically, narrative is, according to the theories of Frank

Kermode and Paul Ricoeur, the mode through which historical time is configured.

Consequently, narrative demands the highest attention from an investigation of

historical time. In privileging narrative, I am following the lead of previous studies of

time in modernism, such as those of A. A. Mendilow, Hans Meyerhoff, Ricardo

Quinones, and Ronald Schleifer, which have concentrated on novelistic narrative.109

As Ann Banfield points out, in literary modernism ‘it is the novel, almost alone

among genres, which is typically linked to time and to innovations in the

representations of temporality’.110 Yet, restricting the focus of this thesis to narrative

works involves overlooking modernist poetry, which offers a comparable array of

articulations of historical time to those found in modernist novels. Most important,

perhaps, are The Cantos (1917-69) of Ezra Pound as a ‘poem containing history’, the

107 See Heise, Chronoschisms, 2, 47. 108 For major studies on the relationship between time and narrative, see E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1927); M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist ([written 1937-8]; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84-258; Georges Poulet, Etudes sur le temps humain, i (Paris: Plon, 1949); Adam Abraham Mendilow, Time and the Novel (London: Peter Nevill, 1952); Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction: With a New Epilogue, new edn (1967; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (1966-72; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols (1983-5; Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1984-8); David Carr, Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Genevieve Lloyd, Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1993); and Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 109 Mendilow, Time and the Novel; Meyerhoff, Time in Literature; Ricardo J. Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 110 Banfield, ‘Time Past’, 48.

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poetry of W. B. Yeats informed by his cosmological scheme of historical cycles or

gyres set forth in A Vision (1926, 1937), and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935-42).111

Within narrative works, I focus narrowly on those of three English-language writers:

Wells, Lawrence and Woolf. Set within the same literary and cultural scene, these

writers articulated interestingly contrasting conceptions of history and historical time,

in part in response to each other. For example, as will be seen, both Lawrence and

Woolf responded to Wells’s conception of history: Lawrence attacked Wells’s notion

of historical progress, against which his own cyclical conception of history forms a

striking contrast, and Woolf engaged with Wellsian history in Between the Acts, in

which Wells’s Outline of History stands as a model for both Lucy Swithin’s Outline

of History and Miss La Trobe’s historical pageant. Moreover, Wells and Lawrence are

particularly rich candidates for a study of historical time, as they are in the unusual

position of having written histories as well as novels. This enables useful comparison

of their historical and fictional narratives, and of how historical time is articulated in

each. While Lawrence and Woolf are canonical high modernists, Wells is a peripheral

figure on most conceptions of modernism. Despite his peripheral position, I will

include him here on the grounds that, through his influence, he is centrally important

to an understanding of time in modernism. The Time Machine, though more

commonly studied alongside Victorian and fin-de-siècle literature, nevertheless stands

at the cusp of modernism, and influentially anticipates what Heise identifies as a

major aspect of the modernist (and indeed postmodernist) concern with time: the

negotiation of the vast time-scales of geology and the natural sciences.112 Similarly,

Wells’s hugely popular universal histories, though not obviously works of modernism

111 Donald Hall, ‘Ezra Pound: An Interview’, The Paris Review, 28 (Summer-Fall 1962), 22-51, 47. 112 Heise, Chronoschisms, 38-9.

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themselves, were nevertheless published in the heyday of modernism—the Short

History, for example, was first published in the watershed year of 1922—and

influenced many modernist writers, including Lawrence and Woolf. Arguably, they

are as important to English modernism as Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West

(1918-22), which Wyndham Lewis selected in Time in Western Man as his foremost

example of a history which reflects the ‘time-mind’.113 Once again, however, I

address these writers at the expense of other modernist works in which historical time

plays an important role, such as Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924) and James

Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939).

Finally, even within the work of the writers studied, my discussion of historical time

is limited. For example, I have focused on Woolf’s last novel, despite the fact that

historical time is of great importance to other of her novels such as To the Lighthouse

(1927). While its scope is therefore narrow, I will conclude this thesis by considering

ways in which its general approach of investigating historical time could be extended

to other works within modernism. In particular, I will suggest how it might provide a

useful framework for theorizing the colonial and postcolonial forms of temporality

which are being revealed by the newly-expanded spatial reach of the ‘new modernist

studies’.

Time and Narrative

To explore Wells’s, Lawrence’s and Woolf’s different conceptions of historical time,

I will draw on Frank Kermode and Paul Ricoeur’s accounts of the relation between

113 For Lewis, Spengler stands as the ‘most undiluted and intensest specimen of the theorizing time-mind that has so far been produced’ (Time, 213).

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narrative and historical time. In particular, I will adopt from these critics their shared

contentions that narrative is central to the configuration of historical time, and that

narrative involves a humanization of time. Given Kermode’s narrow focus on

narrative endings and apocalyptic ‘fictions of the end’, I will turn to Ricoeur to offer a

more general account of the link between narrative and human time.

Kermode’s classic study, The Sense of an Ending (1967), concerns what he calls

‘sense-making’, or the ‘need to know the shape of life in relation to the perspectives

of time’.114 Sense-making is a narrative activity, or the activity of telling stories in

order to understand one’s place in time and history: ‘men rush “into the middest”, and

to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends’.115 By

imposing a narrative organization on the events of history, and seeing it as structured

by an end and a beginning, people make sense of their place within the larger scheme

of history. The fictive concords in which Kermode is most interested in The Sense of

an Ending are ‘fictions of the End’, or ways in which the end of the world has been

imagined.116 He shows how an apocalyptic belief in the end of the world has been

remarkably resilient to repeated disconfirmation, and has survived in various forms:

indeed, he argues that ‘the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of

making sense of the world’.117 In particular, he argues for the centrality of apocalypse

to modernism, for which ‘the sense of an ending’ is ‘endemic’.118 Within modernism,

the sense of an ending does not always surface in the form of a crude prediction of the

end of the world, but more subtly through the transmission of concepts from the

114 Kermode, Ending, 3. 115 Kermode, Ending, 7. 116 Kermode, Ending, 5. 117 Kermode, Ending, 28. 118 Kermode, Ending, 98.

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apocalyptic tradition such as ‘transition’ and ‘crisis’, which become central to

modernists’ ways of making sense of their position in time.

As well as using Kermode’s concept of ‘sense-making’, I will adopt his contention

that narrative involves a humanization of time. He describes plot as ‘an organization

that humanizes time by giving it form’.119 His celebrated illustration of this thesis is

that of a clock ticking. While a clock makes a series of qualitatively identical sounds,

we impose a fictional organization onto this series by referring to its sound not as

‘tick-tick’ but as ‘tick-tock’. The interval between the tick and the tock gains

significance by being poised between a beginning and an end: it is experienced

through a form of ‘temporal integration’, which is a ‘way of bundling together

perception of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future, in a

common organization’.120 By imposing a fictional organization on the sound of a

clock through hearing ‘tock’ as an end, what was an empty homogenous time of mere

succession becomes a humanized form of time charged with meaning.

Kermode’s basic example of the clock can be generalized to more complicated plots,

including to fictional narratives such as novels, and to historical narratives. All plots,

for him, are organizations that humanize time by giving it form. He uses the terms

‘chronos’ and ‘kairos’ to describe the qualitative transformation which narrative

effects on time. Chronos is the time of ‘mere successiveness’, whereas kairos is ‘a

point in time filled with significance, charged with meaning derived from its relation

to the end’.121 Narrowly, it a Biblical context, kairos is time ‘charged with meaning’

because it is seen in relation to the future, or the End, which it foreshadows, and in 119 Kermode, Ending, 45. 120 Kermode, Ending, 46. 121 Kermode, Ending, 192, 47.

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relation to the past, which it transforms by validating Old Testament types and

prophecies. The divine plot then becomes ‘the pattern of kairoi in relation to the

End’.122 Kermode broadens the distinction between chronos and kairos beyond this

theological context: within any form of narrative organization, ‘that which was

conceived of as simply successive becomes charged with past and future: what was

chronos becomes kairos’.123 The distinction applies to the example of the clock: the

‘fictive end’ of the ‘tock’ purges the interval of simple chronicity, and achieves a

‘temporal integration’, converting a blank into a kairos.124 The same applies to ‘the

time of the novelist’: events in a novel are not arrayed in an empty homogenous time

of mere successiveness, but are set within a kairological time by virtue of their

relation to the novel’s beginning and end.125 Once again, historical narratives, by

organising events into a narrative form structured by a beginning and ending,

transform historical time from mere chronological succession to a humanized

kairological time.

Kermode’s account of narrative’s humanization of time is useful, although its

limitations should be noted. In The Sense of an Ending, he is concerned

predominantly with one type of narrative—apocalyptic narrative, or fictions of the

End—which leads him to emphasize narrative endings, and how such endings

humanize time. Such a focus is valuable. Indeed, in this thesis, I will draw on

Kermode’s understanding of narrative endings, and his distinction between chronos

and kairos, in my discussion of H. G. Wells, and the humanization of geological time

in his universal histories. His account of narrative is particularly pertinent here

122 Kermode, Ending, 47. 123 Kermode, Ending, 46. 124 Kermode, Ending, 192. 125 Kermode, Ending, 44.

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because Wells self-consciously draws on two models of history with clearly defined

ends as a narrative form to organize his teleological history: Biblical history, and

Kant’s universal history with a cosmopolitan aim. Because Wells’s narrative model is

Biblical and end-governed, there is an easy translation of terms between his history

and Kermode’s narrative theory. However, while useful, narrative endings are not the

only means by which time becomes humanized through narrative. As Ricoeur points

out, Kermode’s apocalyptic model ‘is only one paradigm among others, which in no

way exhausts the dynamics of narrative’.126 To redress the limitations of Kermode’s

account, I will turn to Ricoeur, who offers a complementary though more general

account of the relation between narrative and time.

Paul Ricoeur, like Kermode, holds narrative to play a central role in the configuration

of historical time. In Time and Narrative (1983-5), which remains the most

sophisticated and compelling exploration of the relation between time and narrative to

date, Ricoeur develops an account of the interdependence of narrative and temporality

through two overlapping oppositions. On the one hand, there is the theoretical

opposition internal to explicitly theoretical or philosophical reflections on time

between what Ricoeur calls the ‘phenomenological’ and ‘cosmological’ perspectives:

the ‘time of the soul’ and the ‘time of the world’. On the other, there is the opposition

between such reflections taken as a whole (and given the name ‘aporetics of

temporality’) and the refiguration of time through narrative in historical and fictional

discourses, the exposition of which falls under the heading of a ‘poetics of narrative’.

The connection between the two oppositions is that the first opposition can be shown

to be resolved in the poetics of narrative: the opposition between phenomenological

126 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 73.

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and cosmological forms of time is ‘poetically resolved’ through narrative, and its

ability to configure historical time.127

Ricoeur advances an account of how historical and fictional narratives configure

historical time, with his theory of threefold mimesis. Supposedly, historical time is the

product of the ‘(re)inscription of lived time onto cosmic time’ in the form of a

threefold narrative mimesis, whose stages Peter Osborne usefully summarises:

mimesis 1: a prefiguration of the narrative structure of historical time in the structure of human action and its everyday interpretation; mimesis 2: the configuration of historical time through the construction of narratives that are ‘overlaid’ on the chronological framework of a shared cosmic time; mimesis 3: the refiguration of lived time by virtue of the effect of its narrative configuration back upon the experience of the reader.128

As part of his analysis of mimesis 2, Ricoeur holds that narratives combine in variable

proportions two temporal dimensions: an episodic dimension and a configurational

dimension.129 The episodic dimension draws narrative time in the dimension of linear

time, in which events follow each other indefinitely in an open series. By contrast, the

configurational dimension draws narrative time in the direction of human time. There

are three aspects to this configurational dimension of narrative. One—and here

Ricoeur explicitly echoes Kermode—is through narrative endings: ‘the configuration

of the plot imposes the “sense of an ending” . . . on an indefinite succession of

incidents’.130 Here, Ricoeur is in full agreement with Kermode’s analysis in The Sense

of an Ending: just as Kermode had held that imposing a narrative ending on a series

of events transformed what was mere chronological succession into kairos, so

127 See Osborne, Politics of Time, 47. 128 Summary adapted from Osborne, Politics of Time, 53. 129 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 66-8; Ricoeur previously gave a near-identical account of the two temporal dimensions of narrative in his ‘Narrative Time’, 177-80. 130 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 67.

43

Ricoeur holds that a ‘new quality of time emerges from this understanding’.131

However, by identifying an additional two aspects of the configurational dimension of

narrative—the transformation of a series of narrative events into a meaningful whole,

and narrative repetition—Ricoeur provides a richer account than Kermode of the way

in which narrative configures and humanizes time.

Like Kermode, Ricoeur holds that narrative involves a humanization of time. The

central claim of Time and Narrative is that ‘time becomes human time to the extent

that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to

the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience’.132 This humanization

of time arises through the features of the configurational aspect of narrative

mentioned above, all of which correspond to phenomenological aspects of time: the

imposition of a sense of an ending, the grasping together of the series of events as a

whole, and the recollection or repetition of a story.133 This account of the

humanization of time by narrative is more sophisticated than that of Kermode.

Ricoeur appeals not to Kermode’s relatively simplistic distinction between chronos

and kairos, but to Heidegger’s phenomenological account of time, and his hierarchy

of modes of temporalization in Being and Time. Narrative, for Ricoeur, draws readers

from an inauthentic everyday conception of time, on which time is conceived of as a

series of instants succeeding one another along an abstract line oriented in a single

dimension (an understanding of time which corresponds to Kermode’s chronos), to

the more fundamental temporal levels of within-timeness (Innerzeitigkeit) and

historicality (Geschlichtlichkeit).134 The humanization of time is thus not considered

131 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 67. 132 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 3. 133 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 68. 134 Ricoeur, ‘Narrative Time’, 170, 178, 180.

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simply as the transition from chronos to kairos, but as the transition to ever deeper

levels of phenomenological temporality, which in turn are projected back onto cosmic

time in the form of historical time.

I will use Kermode and Ricoeur’s accounts of narrative to address the relation

between time and narrative in the writings of Wells, Lawrence and Woolf. Given

these theorists’ understanding of the importance of narrative for the configuration of

historical time, my thesis will pay close attention to the formal aspects of the

narratives of the writers studied. In the chapters on Wells, I will use Kermode and

Ricoeur’s theories of narrative humanizing time to contrast the different forms of

geological time in The Time Machine and in Wells’s universal histories. Ricoeur

argues that ‘time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the

manner of a narrative’; conversely, through its resistance to narrative organization, the

geological time of The Time Machine remains inhuman and sublime. By contrast, the

narrative organization of Wells’s universal histories humanizes geological time.

Kermode’s account of the humanization of time by plot is particularly apt, given

Wells’s use of a Biblical scheme of universal history as a model for his histories, and

the importance that he gives to an ending in his narrative organization of history. In

Kermode’s terms, geological time is transformed from being the empty time of mere

succession (chronos) to being a kairological time which is, as we shall see, charged

with political significance.

Once again, I will draw on Kermode to elucidate the relation between time and

narrative in Lawrence’s writing. Kermode shows how apocalypse has shaped our

culture’s sense of an ending, and how fictions of an end impose a pattern on historical

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time, and give a sense or meaning to history. Yet Lawrence resisted this sense of an

ending. Adapting Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence, he rejected linear

schemes of history, and instead plotted history as a cycle. By rejecting the Christian

sense of an ending, Lawrence restructured the Christian pattern imposed on historical

time, and the meaning that is derived from that ending.

Ricoeur’s theory of the reconfiguration of time by narrative through the process of

threefold mimesis provides a useful way of approaching the audience’s reaction to the

pageant in Woolf’s Between the Acts. Ricoeur’s theory is a theory about the power of

narratives to refigure their readers’ experience of time, and particularly their

experience of historical time. Between the Acts is a particularly rich fictional

exploration of just such a scenario. Here, what Ricoeur calls the refiguration of

historical time is set within the novel, by means of its meta-fictional structure, as the

audience’s reactions to Miss La Trobe’s historical pageant are fictively imagined (as

are Lucy Swithin’s reactions to her Wellsian Outline of History). Lucy’s Outline and

Miss La Trobe’s historical pageant are both historical narratives which promise to

‘make sense’ of their place in history for Lucy and for the pageant’s audience at a

particularly troubled time: a June day in 1939, overshadowed by the prospect of an

imminent world war. In particular, I will focus on the audience’s response to one

aspect of the pageant: their reaction to its fiction of an aeviternal nature. As we shall

see, while this fiction provides Lucy with a reassuring sense of historical continuity,

Isa is less easily reassured, and wishes for there to be an ending to history.

My appeal to the narrative theories of Kermode and Ricoeur, and the connections

which they draw between narrative and the configuration of historical time, aims to

46

challenge Bergsonian accounts of the relationship between time and narrative in the

modernist novel. On Stevenson’s view, for instance, modernist narrative, with its

formal innovations and multifarious anachronies, is a means of portraying a

Bergsonian psychological time. ‘Modernist narrative’, he claims, ‘seeks to place

“everything in the mind”’, and with the help of memory as a central structuring

device, strives to represent a psychological time.135 Heise shares a similar view,

holding that modernist narrative depicts a ‘multiplicity of private temporalities’;

against such a conception of modernist narrative, she then contrasts postmodern

narrative which, with its repetitions, metalepses and experimental typographies, is not

tied to any specific human observer, but simply to the temporality of the text itself.136

By contrast, with the aid of the narrative theories of Kermode and Ricoeur, I aim to

demonstrate that modernist narrative is notable not only for its portrayal of

psychological time, but also (breaking free from the problematic Bergsonian

distinction between psychological and clock-time) for its configuration of historical

time.

Further, Kermode and Ricoeur’s accounts of historical time will prove useful for

addressing the politics of time of the writers here studied. In The Sense of an Ending,

Kermode makes clear how politically-charged apocalypticism is as a paradigm of

‘sense-making’, and how much political power has been generated through history by

people’s belief that they were living at the end of times. In doing so, he draws

attention to Norman Cohn’s classic study, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957),

which traces a tradition of ‘revolutionary millenarianism’ through the middle ages, 135 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 96. 136 Heise, Chronoschisms, 51, 64. Heise’s understanding of modernist narrative is slightly more sophisticated than Stevenson’s, insofar as she holds that modernist narrative seeks to juxtapose the memories and perceptions of several different characters, and thereby creates an inter-subjectively shared social time.

47

and thereby shows how apocalyptic prophecies ‘deeply affected political attitudes’.137

In the epilogue to his study, Cohn connects the tradition of revolutionary

millenarianism to political movements in the early twentieth century, and notably to

communism in the Soviet Union and to National Socialism in Germany. For instance,

he points out that the National Socialist Party drew on Joachim of Fiore’s (c. 1135-

1202) form of millenarianism (as did D. H. Lawrence), and his idea of a third

historical age, to form the idea of the ‘Third Reich’, a millennial age which was to last

a thousand years.138 Within literary modernism, Kermode connects the apocalypticism

of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis to their reactionary

politics.139

In part, I will extend Kermode’s investigation by exploring the connection between

Lawrence’s use of a Joachite apocalyptic shape of history (in combination with a

Nietzschean historical rupture) and his politics. However—and this is a central

contention of this thesis—it was not only the apocalyptic shape of history, and what

Giorgio Agamben calls ‘eschatological time’, which were political within modernism:

rather, the other forms of historical time studied here are equally politically-

charged.140 For instance, Woolf’s use of the fiction of the aevum in Between the Acts

carries a politics. Aeviternity, like eschatological time, has its own history as a

politically-charged temporal order, having served political and juristic functions. Most

notably, it underpinned the doctrine of the king’s two bodies, through which the

137 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. edn (London: Pimlico, 1993), 35; see Kermode, Ending, 14. 138 Cohn, Millennium, 285; compare Kermode, Ending, 13. 139 Kermode, Ending, 104-14. 140 Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 62.

48

legitimacy of the monarch’s political power was guaranteed.141 Woolf’s use of the

fiction of aeviternity in Between the Acts, like previous uses of the concept, carries its

own politics. Similarly, recognizing the political aspect of Wells’s humanized

geological time, and Lawrence’s adaptations of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal

recurrence, is to broaden Kermode’s narrow focus on the politics of the apocalyptic

paradigm to the politics of historical time more generally.

I should note that there is a significant difference between my approach to time and

narrative in this thesis, and Benedict Anderson’s influential contention in Imagined

Communities (1983) that the time of the novel is a homogenous empty time. He

argues that the time of the nation and the time of the novel are both homogenous

empty times, and that the rise of print culture, including the spread of the novel,

facilitated the rise of nationalism by the articulation of such a time.142 His contention

that the novel ‘is clearly a device for the presentation of simultaneity in

“homogenous, empty time”’ implicitly carries the weight of authority from

Benjamin’s very similar association between narrative and homogenous empty

time.143 For example, in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Benjamin argued

that historicism relies on a form of homogenous empty time, which he associated with

narrative by claiming that the historian is ‘drained by the whore called “Once upon a

time” in historicism’s bordello’.144 (By contrast, Benjamin’s preferred materialist

historiography, based around the constellation and the dialectical image, is markedly

141 See Kermode, Ending, 73. 142 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006), 22-36. More fully, Anderson argues that the medieval conception of ‘simultaneity-along-time’, which views time as ‘something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic time’, was superseded by a conception of ‘homogenous, empty time’ (‘to borrow again from Benjamin’), in which simultaneity is marked by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar (24). 143 Anderson, Communities, 25. 144 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 254.

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non-narrative.) Anderson reconfigures Benjamin’s argument by holding that

nationalism rather than historicism relies on a form of homogenous empty time; in

doing so, he retains Benjamin’s connection between narrative and homogenous empty

time, claiming that the time of the novel is just such a time.

However, by adopting Kermode and Ricoeur’s theories of time and narrative, I

diverge from both Benjamin and Anderson in holding that narrative time (including

the time of the novel) is not a homogenous empty time, but is rather a

phenomenological, lived time. This difference is most readily apparent in Ricoeur’s

distinction between the episodic and configurational dimensions of narrative. While

for Ricoeur the episodic dimension of narrative draws narrative time in the direction

of the time of succession (or what Anderson calls homogenous empty time), the

configurational dimension makes narrative time a human time.

My rejection of Anderson’s understanding of the time of the novel parallels a similar

rejection of that thesis in the recent ‘temporal turn’ in American studies, which is

associated particularly with the work of Wai Chee Dimock, Thomas Allen, and Lloyd

Pratt.145 Work in this field has exploited Anderson’s suggestive link between the

emergence of a time of the nation and the time of the novel. However, it has tended to

revise his contention that both should be understood as homogenous empty time. Both

Pratt and Dimock explicitly reject Anderson’s understanding of the time of the novel.

Pratt rejects Anderson’s ‘account of the realist novel’s production of an experience of

simultaneity and homogenous empty time’, which ‘continues to be taken for granted 145 See in particular Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Thomas M. Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

50

in many quarters’, on the grounds that it relies on an imperfect theory of genre.

Instead, he argues that as genres develop, they adapt and cannibalize previous genres,

and thereby ‘accrete a range of different and competing temporalities’.146 More

bluntly, Dimock claims that ‘Benedict Anderson cannot be more wrong about the

time of the novel’.147

Conceptually equipped with the narrative theories of Kermode and Ricoeur, this

thesis will be a study of modernist ‘grand narratives’. The term ‘grand narrative’ or

‘grand récit’ was introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition

(1979), in which he famously defined ‘postmodern’ as ‘incredulity towards

metanarratives’.148 As Heise points out, Lyotard’s thesis about the demise of grand

narratives and the proliferation of local or micro-narratives has been widely

influential on theories of postmodernism and of postmodern fiction.149 Redeploying

Lyotard’s thesis within the context of modernism, I will investigate modernist ‘grand

narratives’ at a time before they suffered their supposed demise.

Lyotard uses the terms ‘grand narrative’ or ‘metanarrative’ to designate second-order

narratives which seek to articulate and legitimate some concrete first-order practices

or narrative; central examples he gives of such narratives are those of G. W. F. Hegel

146 Pratt, Archives, 8. 147 Dimock, Continents, 88. The other premise of Anderson’s argument—that the time of nation is an empty homogenous time—has also been challenged, most influentially by Homi Bhabha in ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation: Nation and Narration’ (in Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 291-322). Bhabha argues for the revised thesis that the time of the nation is a ‘double and split’ time (295). As Pratt points out, Bhabha and other postcolonial critics reversed Anderson’s account of nationalism by means of a refigured account of time in the realist novel: where ‘Anderson proposed that the novel articulates homogenous empty time, postcolonial studies showed how the realist novel articulates competing orders of time’ (8-9). 148 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on the Condition of Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), xxiv. 149 Heise, Chronoschisms, 16-7.

51

and Karl Marx, as well as the Enlightenment narrative of the emancipation of the

rational subject.150 In this study, I shall be concerned neither with grand-narratives as

second-order narratives (and for that reason I will not employ the term

‘metanarrative’, which suggests a narrative about narratives), nor shall I be concerned

with narratives insofar as they legitimate knowledge. Rather, I will use ‘grand

narrative’ as a terminological bridge between Kermode and Ricoeur’s theories of

narrative. I will use it as a synonym for what Kermode calls ‘fictive concords’, or

‘concord-fictions’: fictions with historical beginnings and ends which help us make

sense of our lives within the perspectives of time.151 (In this sense, The Sense of an

Ending could be said to be an exploration of grand narratives, and in particular of

grand narratives of apocalypse). Equally, I will use the term ‘grand narrative’ to

designate those historical and fictional narratives which best, according to Ricoeur’s

threefold theory of mimesis, configure historical time.152 In this slightly modified

sense, fictional as well as historical narratives can qualify as grand narratives. It is

perfectly possible, for instance, that a novel could count as a grand narrative. Indeed,

grand narratives arise in a variety of different domains, including historiography,

science, philosophy and literature.153

The following chapters will address the historical and fictional grand narratives of

Wells, Lawrence and Woolf. Most immediately, Wells and Lawrence advanced their

own historical grand narratives: Wells’s Outline of History and Short History of the 150 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiii. 151 Kermode, Ending, 7, 190. 152 Here, I follow the lead of J. M. Bernstein, who suggests that Ricoeur’s account of narrative repetition is best seen as an account of grand narratives. See his ‘Grand Narratives’, in David Wood (ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1991), 102-123, 119. 153 Allan Megill points out that, within historiography, grand narratives are closely allied to the tradition of universal history, which includes both Christian universal history, whose model is provided by the Bible, and secular universal history, such as Kant’s plan for a universal history with a cosmopolitan aim. See his Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 167-70.

52

World are grand narratives which tell the story of mankind, and Lawrence’s

Movements in European History is a grand narrative which tells the story of European

history from the founding of Rome in 753 B.C. to his present day. In a more subtle

form, historical grand narratives all appear, in different ways, within the fiction of

Woolf, Lawrence and Wells. A cosmological grand narrative of the degeneration of

the human species and the gradual heat-death of the earth forms the background to the

Traveller’s journey into the distant future in The Time Machine. Lady Chatterley’s

Lover dramatises a Nietzschean and apocalyptic epochal transition, marked by

Connie’s pagan rebirth. And Between the Acts contains two historical grand narratives

embedded within its fictional form: Lucy’s Wellsian Outline of History, and Miss La

Trobe’s village pageant, which tells the story of the English nation from the earliest

times to the present day. How, we might ask, do these historical and fictional grand

narratives reflect and participate in different configurations of historical time? And

what politics do they thereby express?

PART 1:

H. G. WELLS, GEOLOGY AND THE ABYSS OF TIME

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Nineteenth-century natural science transformed the understanding of the earth’s past

and future, giving rise to a host of competing grand narratives, many of which were in

conflict with the prevailing Biblical understanding of the world’s history. Stephen

Toulmin and June Goodfield point out that ‘the first branch of natural science to

become genuinely historical was geology’, and that between 1750 and 1850

geologists ‘created a new and vastly extended time-scale, anchored in the rock strata

and fossils of the Earth’s crust’.1 While Bishop Ussher had famously dated Creation

in 4004 B.C. on the basis of an interpretation of Biblical history, geologists such as

James Hutton (1726-97) and Charles Lyell (1797-1875) advanced new conceptions of

geological or ‘deep’ time, and suggested that the earth was immensely older than

previously thought.2

James Hutton combined his doctrine that all the past changes of the earth have been

brought about by the slow agency of existing causes with a conception of cyclical

geological processes whereby the earth is continually wasted and renewed. His

‘Theory of the Earth’ (1788) concludes with the celebrated statement that: ‘[t]he

result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no

prospect of an end’.3 Charles Lyell, in his Principles of Geology (1830-3), accepted

Hutton’s reasoning that if all past changes of the globe have been brought about by

the slow agency of existing causes, then the earth must be ancient beyond human

1 Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 171, 141. See also Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 2 ‘Deep time’ is the time over while long-term geological and astronomical processes operate. The term was coined by John McPhee in his Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1981). 3 James Hutton, ‘Theory of the Earth; Or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1 (1788), 209-304, 304; see also his Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations, i (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1795), 200. On Hutton’s theory of the earth, see Rudwick, Bursting, 158-72.

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powers of comprehension, and built a ‘uniformitarian’ system on this basis.

Geological ‘catastrophists’ typically required shorter timescales to explain the present

state of the earth because they could appeal to violent catastrophes such as Noachian

deluges. By contrast, Lyell’s ‘doctrine of absolute uniformity’ asserted that events in

the remote past had never been of greater extent, suddenness or intensity than

presently acting causes, and thereby pointed to a much greater age of the earth.4

Stephen Jay Gould has compared the importance of Hutton and Lyell’s discovery of

geological time to that of the Copernican revolution in astronomy, the Darwinian

revolution in biology, and the Freudian revolution in psychology.5

The narratives that geologists such as Hutton and Lyell told about the past and

probable future of the earth paved the way for later developments in Victorian

science, but were also complicated by those developments. As Rudwick points out,

the ‘historicization of the earth, in what became the science of geology, was soon

extended to other parts of the natural world, above all in Darwin’s conception of the

historical character of living organisms’. He makes clear that the reconstruction of

geohistory was ‘historically distinct from, as well as being an indispensible

precondition for, the slightly later reconstruction of . . . [the] history of life in the

perspective of Darwinian evolution’.6 In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles

Darwin paid tribute to Lyell for showing the immense age of the earth, without which

his theory of evolution by natural selection would not have been possible. He wrote 4 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, i (London: John Murray, 1830), 87; see also 76-80. On Lyell’s doctrine of absolute uniformity, see Rudwick, Adam, 303-5. As Rudwick points out, the terms ‘uniformitarian’ and ‘catastrophist’ were first introduced by William Whewell in his review of the second volume of Lyell’s Principles, which was first published in the Quarterly Review in 1832 (Adam, 358; see William Whewell, ‘[Review of] Principles of geology . . . Vol. II. London. 1832’, Quarterly Review, 93 (March 1832), 103-32, 126). 5 Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (London: Harvard University Press, 1987), 1-2. 6 Rudwick, Bursting, 7.

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that ‘[h]e who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology,

which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural

science, yet does not admit how incomprehensively vast have been the past periods of

time, may at once close this volume’.7 Evolutionary biology suggested that

humankind had evolved slowly from other forms of life over an immense time span,

and was susceptible to evolve further in the future, in the form of either a biological

progression or a retrogression. The latter possibility underpins the ‘discourses of

degeneration’ which proliferated in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and

which, as William Greenslade points out, were ‘[f]ounded on the Darwinian

revolution in biology’.8

The geologists’ understanding of the earth’s past and probable future was complicated

by thermodynamic physics, which suggested that the universe was undergoing a

physical decay through the dissipation of mechanical energy, and consequently that

the earth might suffer a heat-death. As Bruce Clarke informs us, many, including

James Joule, Robert Mayer, Macquorn Rankine, Hermann von Helmholtz, James

Clarke Maxwell and Rudolph Clausius share the honour of first formulating

thermodynamic principles from the 1840s to the 1860s. However, it was William

Thomson who first articulated both the immediate terms and the cosmological

consequences of the second law of thermodynamics.9 In his paper ‘On a Universal

Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy’ (1852), he formulated

7 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), 282. 8 William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15-6. 9 Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 3. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy (disorganisation) of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

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the outcome of the second law of thermodynamics as the ‘dissipation of mechanical

energy’: as a result, ‘within a finite period of time to come the earth must [be] unfit

for the habitation of man as at present constituted’.10 Thermodynamic physics thereby

contravened the grand narratives of earlier geologists, and Hutton’s optimistic

conclusion that we find ‘no prospect of an end’. Moreover, physical theorists such as

Thomson vied with geologists over the age of the earth, arguing that the earth was far

younger than geologists had suggested.11 As Joe Burchfield points out, this

controversy was not resolved—and then in favour of the geologists—until the turn of

the century, with the discovery of radioactivity and the invention of the radiometric

dating of rocks. Radioactivity indicated a far greater age of the earth than physical

theorists such as Thomson had been willing to grant, and discredited theories of heat-

death as a relatively imminent consequence of the second law of thermodynamics.12

In this part of my study, I will address geological time in H. G. Wells’s writing. In

chapter 1.1, I will focus on his early scientific romance, The Time Machine (1895),

before moving on in chapter 1.2 to his universal histories, The Outline of History

(1920) and A Short History of the World (1922). Addressing geological time in

Wells’s writing forms part of my attempt to unsettle Bergsonian readings of time in

modernism. Geological time is a cosmological time, or a time of nature, which

contrasts markedly with Henri Bergson’s psychological durée.13 In Chronoschisms

10 William Thomson, ‘On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy’, in Mathematical and Physical Papers, i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882), 511-4, 511. 11 See, in particular, William Thomson, ‘On the Age of the Sun’s Heat’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 5 (5 March 1862), 388-93; and ‘On Geological Time’ (1868), in Popular Lectures and Addresses, ii (London; New York: Macmillan, 1894), 10-64. For an overview of the controversy between the geologists and the physical theorists on the age on the earth, see Joe D. Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth (London: Macmillan, 1975), 90-116. 12 See Burchfield, Kelvin, 163-205. 13 As we saw in the introduction to this thesis, Paul Ricoeur contrasts cosmological time, or the time of nature, with phenomenological time, or human time (see Time and Narrative, iii, 4, 12). For Ricoeur, the discovery of geological time by natural scientists ‘was the source of so much consternation . . .

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(1997), Ursula Heise complicates the Bergsonian picture of time in modernism which

she adopts from Stephen Kern:

[i]f the conflict between . . . public and private temporality constitutes one of the major concerns of culture and art in the first decades of the twentieth century, the modernist reflection on time can nevertheless not simply be reduced to this conflict. Other complications emerge when one considers the contribution of the natural sciences to the reconceptualization of time in the modernist period. Already in the nineteenth century, geology and evolution theory opened up the prospect that our planet and organic life had existed for time periods that lie beyond human experienceability.14

Exploring geological time in Wells’s writing allows me to exploit the tension which

Heise diagnoses between the purported modernist interest in Bergsonian private time

and the modernist interest in ‘time scales large beyond the reach of common-sense

comprehension’.15 However, I wish to go further than Heise’s acknowledgement that

the interest in cosmological time forms one of a number of ‘complications’ in the

otherwise satisfactory Bergsonian picture, and argue that the Bergsonian picture ought

to be abandoned altogether. Further, my reading of geological time in Wells seeks to

contest readings of modernist time as being apolitical. I will argue that, while

geological time forms part of the cosmic pessimism of The Time Machine, it becomes

central to his later political writings, and notably to his universal histories, where it

supports his vision of a cosmopolitan world state.

I will address geological time in Wells’s writing in part through narrative. I will place

The Time Machine and Wells’s universal histories in the context of the radically new

and sometimes bleak narratives about the past and future of the earth and humanity

that arose within natural science and surrounding discourses, and more specifically

because it brought to light a disproportion, easily translated in terms of incommensurability, between human time and the time of nature’ (89). 14 Heise, Chronoschisms, 38. 15 Heise, Chronoschisms, 38. As indicated in the introduction to this thesis, I will read The Time Machine as a fin-de-siècle romance which stands at the cusp of modernism, and Wells’s universal histories as popular histories which were published in the heyday of modernism.

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within the context of the ‘deep’ historical narratives that geologists used in their

reconstructions of the geohistory of the earth.16 Further, I will draw on Frank

Kermode’s and Paul Ricoeur’s theories of time and narrative, and their accounts of

narrative as humanizing time, to contrast Wells’s treatment of geological time in The

Time Machine and in the universal histories. I will show that the narrative of The

Time Machine is fragmentary, and thereby complements the romance’s depiction of

geological time as a sublime, non-human form of time. By contrast, the continuous

narrative of the universal histories humanizes geological time. What results is two

very different forms of historical time. The historical time of The Time Machine is a

sublime, non-human time of nature, whereas the historical time of the universal

histories is a humanized geological time, which forms the backdrop to a very human

story of progress towards a cosmopolitan society.

1.1 The Time Machine (1895) and the Ruins of Time

Critics have profitably placed H. G. Wells’s early scientific romances in a variety of

scientific contexts. Steven McLean’s recent study, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells:

Fantasies of Science (2009), is exemplary in this regard. By reading his early

scientific romances alongside his contemporary journalism on scientific subjects, and

situating both in the context of his scientific training at the Normal School of Science

in South Kensington, McLean’s study aims to investigate ‘the relationship between

Wells’s scientific romances and the discourses of science in the 1890s and early years

of the twentieth century’.17 Employing comparable approaches, critics have read The

16 See Rudwick, Bursting, 2. 17 Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3. As McLean points out, Wells attended the Normal School of Science in South Kensington between 1884-7, where he was taught by T. H. Huxley (1, 23). A selection of Wells’s

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Time Machine (1895) in two principal scientific contexts: those of evolutionary

biology and thermodynamic physics.

Numerous critics, including William Greenslade, have placed The Time Machine in

the context of evolutionary biology, biological retrogression and contemporary

discourses of degeneration.18 Other critics have discussed the romance in the context

of thermodynamic physics. Bruce Clarke has read The Time Machine as ‘a virtual

allegory of classical thermodynamics’; he shows that its combination of physical and

social entropy reflects a wider transfer within the period of concepts and metaphors

from physical science to social discourses of degeneration.19 Michael Whitworth, in

his discussion of the literary uses of entropy, has drawn illuminating parallels between

The Time Machine and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907).20 Neatly linking the

contexts of thermodynamic physics and evolutionary biology with issues of form,

Michael Sayeau has argued that the physical and social entropy that are themes of the

romance are reflected in its narrative structure, which manifests a type of narrative

entropy, and thereby raises the spectre of the end of fiction.21

Collectively, these critics have demonstrated that the future world which the Time

Traveller visits is one beset by evolutionary retrogression, in which humanity has

degenerated into two species before possibly suffering extinction, and one

important early scientific journalism is reprinted in Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 18 See, in particular, Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution and Ecology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 149-70; McLean, Fantasies, 11-40; Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 30-49; and Greenslade, Degeneration, 32-41. 19 Clarke, Energy Forms, 121-6. See also Allen MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 234-51. 20 Michael Whitworth, ‘Inspector Heat Inspected: The Secret Agent and the Meanings of Entropy’, The Review of English Studies, 49/193 (Feb. 1998), 40-59. 21 Michael Sayeau, Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 109-46; and ‘H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and the “Odd Consequence” of Progress’, Contemporary Justice Review, 8/4 (Dec. 2005), 431-45.

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approaching heat-death, as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics and

the ‘dissipation of mechanical energy’.22 That is, they have shown how Wells, by

drawing on discourses of evolutionary biology and thermodynamic physics, fashioned

his own narrative of a degenerating humanity and a slowly dying earth.

However, while critics have paid ample attention to evolutionary biology and

thermodynamic physics, they have almost entirely overlooked geological discourse.

Certainly, critics such as Frank McConnell, Patrick Parrinder and Simon James have

mentioned both geology and geological time in their discussions of The Time

Machine. For example, McConnell long ago suggested that ‘[w]hat Wells manages to

do in The Time Machine is to articulate, for the first time and decisively for his age, a

vision of the abyss of geological time’.23 More recently, James has astutely pointed

out that ‘The Time Machine’s engagement with Victorian science draws not only on

biology’s reimagining of human physiology, but also on geology’s expansion of the

Victorian sense of time’.24 Yet beyond such passing references, there has not been a

sustained discussion of The Time Machine in the context of geology. This

comparative neglect is perhaps indicative of a wider tendency in the history of science

in which, as Rudwick points out, geology’s historicization of the earth ‘has generally

been treated as a mere prelude to the better-known story of the “Darwinian

revolution”’.25

22 Thomson, ‘Dissipation’, 511. 23 Frank McConnell, The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 82. Parrinder mentions Wells’s ‘use of geological chronology’ in The Time Machine, and points out that Wells’s ‘familiarity with the prehistoric vistas opened up by nineteenth-century geology and archaeology had shaped his vision of time travel’ (Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 40, 38). 24 Simon J. James, Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 56-7. 25 Rudwick, Bursting, 7.

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Regardless of the reasons for its comparative neglect, situating The Time Machine in

the context of geology is rewarding. It provides insight into the conceit of time travel,

the ruined architecture of the future age, and the work’s fragmentary aesthetic. By

reading the romance alongside the geology of James Hutton, Charles Lyell and others

of their era, I will show how Wells drew on a tradition of depicting geological time,

and the individual’s relation to that time, through an aesthetics of the sublime. In turn,

situating The Time Machine in the context of geology promises to throw new light on

the more frequently discussed contexts of evolutionary biology and thermodynamic

physics.

By the time he wrote The Time Machine, H. G. Wells was well-versed in geology.26

He studied geology at the Normal School of Science, where he sat examinations in

geology in 1886 and 1887.27 While he failed the latter exam, as he records in his

autobiography, he later took ‘first place in second class honours in geology’ in his

B.Sc., which was awarded by London University in 1890.28 He subsequently taught

classes in geology at the University Tutorial College, London in 1890, and co-wrote

with R. A. Gregory a text-book called Honours Physiography (1893).29 Honours

Physiography is a text-book that was designed to prepare students at the Royal

College of Science for the ‘Honours Examination’ in Physiography, which covered

26 There are five extant versions of The Time Machine. An early version of the romance, ‘The Chronic Argonauts’, appeared in The Science School Journal in 1888. The Time Machine was published in serialised form in the National Observer in 1894, and in the New Review in 1894-5; it was published in book form by Henry Holt and Co. in America and by William Heinemann in Britain, both in 1895. For an account of the publication history of The Time Machine, see The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells’s Scientific Romance, ed. Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5-10. 27 For a biographical account of Wells’s time at the Normal School of Science, see Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Life of H. G. Wells: The Time Traveller, 2nd edn (London: Hogarth Press, 1987), 53-65. 28 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866), i (London: Victor Gollancz and The Cresset Press, 1934), 188). 29 J. R. Hammond, An H. G. Wells Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 15.

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geology, astronomy and metereology.30 As its preface claims, ‘Honours Physiography

involves a sound knowledge of geological structures in general, and the forces

molding them’; it includes a section on ‘The Age of the Earth’, and a final chapter on

the ‘Distribution of Life in Space and Time’.31 In 1894, Wells reviewed T. G.

Bonney’s The Story of our Planet (1893), which advertises itself as a non-technical

and accessible introduction to geology in the tradition of James Hutton and Charles

Lyell’s uniformitarianism.32

In his autobiography, Wells records an ambivalence in his attitude towards geology.

On the one hand, he criticizes the way that geology was taught at the Normal School

of Science. He recalls being bored rigid by Professor Judd, with his pedantic

commitment to rote-learning. He found most of the geology that he was taught dry,

marred by the unprincipled accumulation of ‘great masses of new material’.33 On the

other hand, he describes how as a boy he had ‘pored over Humboldt’s Cosmos and

began to learn something of geological time’.34 Similarly, he records his interest in the

geology ‘of that great generation which included Lyell and Murchison’, whose

‘general idea’ was, as he puts it, ‘to scrutinize the earth as a whole, say what it is and

what it was, [and] ransack it for evidence of how it originated and what it has gone

through’.35 Even at the Normal School of Science, he was excited by the possibilities

offered by geology. In petrography classes, he recalls examining ‘specimen chunks of

30 The ‘Normal School of Science’ changed its name to the ‘Royal College of Science’ in 1890, before eventually becoming absorbed into Imperial College London. 31 R. A. Gregory and H. G. Wells, Honours Physiography (London: Joseph Hughes, 1893), i. On the title page of this work, Wells is described as ‘Lecturer in Geology at the University Tutorial College; Third in Honours in Geology and Physical Geography at B.Sc.’ (p.iii). 32 T. G. Bonney, The Story of our Planet (London: Cassell, 1893); H. G. Wells, ‘Reminiscences of a Planet’, Pall Mall Gazette, 8990 (Jan. 15, 1894), 4. 33 Wells, Autobiography, i, 184. 34 Wells, Autobiography, i, 98. The reference is to Alexander von Humboldt’s five-volume Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreiben (1845-62), whose title has most often been translated into English as Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. 35 Wells, Autobiography, i, 228.

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rock’ which told of ‘the steady creeping of molecule past molecule, age after age.

And in this interpretation lay the history and understanding of the Earth as a whole’.36

Geological Time Travel

‘The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time’.

John Playfair37

In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), the Time Traveller makes two principal

journeys into the future, before returning home: firstly to the year 802,701 A.D., and

secondly to ‘more than thirty million years hence’.38 The conceit of time travel which

is central to this romance finds a precedent in geological literature, and more

36 Wells, Autobiography, i, 230-1. 37 John Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Dr James Hutton, F. R. S. Edin.’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 5/3 (1805), 39-99, 73. The illustration is the frontispiece to Charles Lyell’s A Manual of Elementary Geology: Or, the Ancient Changes of the Earth and its Inhabitants as Illustrated by Geological Monuments, 3rd edn (London: John Murray, 1851), p.ii. Below the frontispiece is the descriptive title ‘Strata of Red Sandstone, Slightly Inclined, Resting on Vertical Schist, at the Siccar Point, Berwickshire’, and the quotation from Playfair’s ‘Hutton’. The illustration is taken from HathiTrust Digital Library <http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044107339012;view=1up;seq=5> accessed 1 October 2014. 38 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), 28, 84. Unless otherwise specified, all further references are to this edition.

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specifically, in that which Ralph O’Connor calls ‘geological time travel’.39 While, as

O’Connor points out, the ‘idea of being “carried back” into antiquity was . . . a

commonplace among geologists’, a seminal example of such time travel is John

Playfair’s description of an imaginative journey through time at Siccar Point, inspired

by the geology of James Hutton.40

In his ‘Biographical Account of the Late Dr James Hutton’ (1805), John Playfair

described what has become famous in geological lore: the boat trip with Hutton and

James Hall to Siccar Point, Berwickshire, which authenticated Hutton’s theory ‘by the

testimony of the senses’.41 The rocks at Siccar Point are an example of what Hutton

called ‘angular junctions’, or what in modern terms are known as unconformities.

While, as Rudwick points out, several earlier naturalists had described such rock

formations, Hutton reinterpreted them to confirm his theory of a cyclic ‘succession of

worlds’, in which successive rock masses are uplifted then worn down in a cyclical

process.42 Playfair records his impressions of listening to Hutton lecturing on the

rocks:

[w]hat clearer evidence could we have had of the different formation of these rocks, and of the long interval which separated their formation, had we actually seen them emerging from the bosom of the deep? We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a

39 Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 373-4. By extension, Wells’s conceit of time travel also finds a precedent in the various popular theatrical and visual displays such as panoramas and dioramas which, informed by recent geological science, portrayed themselves as time travel into distant geological epochs. See Earth on Show, 263-324. 40 O’Connor, Earth, 374. Although he does not explicitly mention The Time Machine, O’Connor intriguingly suggests that from geological time travel it ‘was only a short step to the scientific romances of . . . H. G. Wells’ (374). 41 Playfair, ‘Hutton’, 72. Wells would have known of James Hutton. Hutton’s work, and its ‘influence on the growth of the Science of Geology’, is the subject of the first chapter of R. D. Roberts’ The Earth’s History: An Introduction to Modern Geology (London: John Murray, 1893), 4-13, a work to which Wells and Gregory refer their readers in Honours Physiography (118). 42 Rudwick, Bursting, 168-9.

67

superincumbent ocean. An epoch still more remote presented itself . . . Revolutions still more remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.43

Playfair here illustrates Hutton’s conception of geological time through the conceit of

an imaginative journey back through the epochs. His description has been widely

celebrated. For example, Charles Lyell used the description of the mind growing

giddy looking into ‘the abyss of time’ as an epigram to his Manual of Elementary

Geology (1851). He also used an illustration of the scene at Siccar Point (which is

reproduced above) as a frontispiece to this work.44 As Rudwick points out, the ‘idea

of time as an abyss was borrowed from [Georges] Buffon, but it encapsulates what

Playfair’s generation (and others since) found most striking about Hutton’s system’.45

It should also be noted that Playfair’s description deploys an aesthetics of the sublime

to portray Hutton’s geological time. In Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (2004),

Noah Heringman argues that geology and Romantic literature were mutually

constitutive discourses that shared a common idiom of landscape aesthetics. As part

of his focus on ‘aesthetic geology’, he has shown that an aesthetics of the sublime and

a related ‘sense of wonder’ was commonly deployed in geological literature.46

43 Playfair, ‘Hutton’, 72-3. 44 Lyell, Manual, p.ii. In the body of the text, having quoted Playfair’s account of the trip to Siccar Point in full, and explaining its significance ‘as illustrating the antiquity . . . of the globe’, Lyell points out that ‘in the frontispiece of this volume the reader will see a view of this classical spot . . . faithfully drawn and coloured from nature by the youngest son of the late Sir James Hall’ (60). Presumably, the three figures in the rowing boat painted by the younger James Hall represent his father, Playfair and Hutton. 45 Rudwick, Bursting, 169. 46 Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). On the geological sublime, see also O’Connor, Earth, 49-51, 151-3, and Cian Duffy, The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700-1830: Classic Ground (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2, 4-5, 15-9. For a classic account of the development of the natural sublime as an aesthetic category, including by means of Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), see Marjorie Hope

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Playfair’s description of the boat trip at Siccar Point forms part of what Heringman

calls the ‘geological sublime’.47 Contemplating the rock strata, the imaginative

journey back through ‘the abyss of time’ takes the form of a sublime experience:

‘[t]he mind seemed to grow giddy’, and, typical of many accounts of sublime

experience, the imagination is ‘overwhelmed’.

In The Time Machine, the Traveller’s journey into the distant future in many respects

resembles Playfair’s description of the mind’s journey back through geological time.

The Traveller’s ‘great strides of a thousand years or more’ on his machine into the

deep future parallel Playfair’s description of feeling imaginatively ‘carried back to the

time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea’, then to

‘[a]n epoch still more remote’, and again through ‘[r]evolutions still more remote’

which ‘appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective’.48 Standing on the

desolate beach in the distant future, the Traveller grows ‘giddy’. Overwhelmed, he

gets off his machine to recover himself, and stands ‘sick and confused’, ‘incapable of

facing the return journey’.49 This giddiness is most immediately explained by the

disorienting rocking of his machine, and the thinness of the air of the future. Yet it

also echoes Playfair’s description of the extremity of his imaginative voyage back

through time: ‘[t]he mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of

time’. In the New Review version of The Time Machine, the Traveller had described

his planned journey into the extreme future in terms which again echo Playfair: ‘I

resolved to run on for one glimpse of the still remoter future—one peep into the

Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959). 47 Heringman, Rocks, 12. 48 Wells, Time Machine, 84. 49 Wells, Time Machine, 85.

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deeper abysm of time—and then to return to you and my own epoch’.50 Playfair’s

‘abyss of time’ becomes Wells’s ‘abysm of time’, and his visual metaphor of

‘looking’ becomes Wells’s ‘glimpse’ and ‘peep’. The Time Traveller’s terminus, at

which he grows giddy and needs to return, is both the extreme point to which he can

travel into a world which is increasingly unable to support life, and also parallels the

limit at which the imagination becomes overwhelmed in the sublime imagination of

deep time, before needing to return to the present day.

Roger Luckhurst suggests that the Traveller’s journey to the desolate beach in The

Time Machine helped to create the ‘cosmic sublime’ of science fiction. He argues that

this scene might form ‘one origin of science fiction’ as a genre, and points out that

‘the perspective of cosmic time in this vision is expressed through sublime terror and

awe’.51 Similar ‘cosmic perspective[s]’ are a feature of Olaf Stapledon’s works, and

later become established in the science fiction of Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov and

others in what Luckhurst calls both the ‘cosmic sublime’ and the ‘SF sublime’.52

While Luckhurst credits Wells with the creation of what was to become the ‘SF

sublime’, this aesthetic can be traced back to geological literature. Playfair’s account

of the trip to Siccar Point is an important example of the sublime experience of

geological time, and moreover one that has marked echoes in The Time Machine.

However, it should be appreciated that this description is characteristic of a wider

tendency in geological literature to use an aesthetic of the sublime to imagine

geological time. As O’Connor points out, the new school of geology, often by

50 Wells, Early Writings, 99. 51 Luckhurst, Science Fiction, 34-5. On the ‘SF sublime’, see also Page, Imagination, 157-8, and Cornel Robu, ‘A Key to Science Fiction: The Sublime’, Foundation, 42 (1988), 21-37. 52 Luckhurst, Science Fiction, 35, 47.

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drawing on astronomy—‘the sublime science par excellence’—partook of ‘an

aesthetic of wonder by which unlimited immensity (spatial or temporal) bewildered

the mind into a temporary and pleasurable loss of rationality’.53 The sublimity of the

Traveller’s voyage into the distant future is heir to such an aesthetic of the sublime in

geological discourse. His experiences in the deep future parallel the geologists’

portrayal of the imagination being overpowered in a sublime confrontation with a vast

geological time.

The Traveller’s journeys through time also resemble more tranquil forms of

geological time travel. In particular, the early stages of his journey parallel Charles

Lyell’s use of imaginative trips through time in his Principles of Geology (1830-3).

Imagination plays an important role in the Principles, in which Lyell stressed the

importance of being able to imagine clearly past time in its immensity. Rudwick

argues that although Lyell’s ‘scientific colleagues (unlike many of the Mosaic

pseudo-geologists) readily accepted a vast time scale on the intellectual level, Lyell

seems to have recognized that it was their scientific imagination that needed

transforming’.54 In the Principles, Lyell advocated reckoning the geological ‘myriads

of ages’ not ‘by arithmetical computation’, but rather by ‘a train of physical events’:

‘signs which convey to our minds more definite ideas than figures can do, of the

immensity of time’.55 The geologist is portrayed as imagining physical changes

through time in a very visual and dynamic manner:

to trace the same system through various transformations—to behold it at successive eras adorned with different hills and valleys, lakes and seas, and

53 O’Connor, Earth, 153. 54 Martin J. S. Rudwick, ‘The Strategy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology’, Isis, 61/1 (Spring 1970), 4-33, 11, his emphasis; compare Adam, 255-6, 304. 55 Lyell, Principles, i, 25.

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peopled with new inhabitants, was the delightful meed of geological research.56

Wells’s romance provides a very concrete version of such an imaginative exercise.

The Traveller builds a time machine, and literally—as opposed to imaginatively—

watches the ages passing as he voyages through deep time. He records how, travelling

on his time machine, he

saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, . . . they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up . . . and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed—melting and flowing under my eyes.57

His watching the ‘whole surface of the earth’ changing before his eyes, and buildings

rise and ‘pass like dreams’, parallels Lyell’s description of the geologist beholding the

earth at ‘successive eras adorned with different hills and valleys’, and ‘peopled with

new inhabitants’. In The Time Machine, the ‘melting and flowing’ of the surface of

the earth also echoes Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), in which the hills

‘flow’ and ‘melt like mist’:

The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.58 This stanza both reveals the influence of Lyell’s conception of geological time on In

Memoriam, and was itself later quoted in geological works.59 For example, in The

Story of Our Planet (1893), which Wells reviewed in 1894, Bonney used the first two

56 Lyell, Principles, i, 25. Bonney characterized the ‘task of the geologist’ in a similarly visual and dynamic way in the Story of our Planet: the task is ‘to delineate in a series of sketches the changing scenes—as sea was replaced by land, or land by sea, as island groups coalesced into continents, or continents were severed and submerged; as mountain chains arose, and as even they, at last, were brought low’ (393). 57 Wells, Time Machine, 19. 58 Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam (London: Strahan, 1870), CXXIII, 192. 59 On the influence of Lyell’s geology on Tennyson, see Dennis Dean, Tennyson and Geology (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1985), Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2008), 65-96, and E. E. Snyder, ‘Tennyson’s Progressive Geology’, Victorian Network, 2/1 (2010), 27-48. Joseph Carroll suggests that Wells’s The Time Machine is a translation of one of the lyric nightmares of In Memoriam (Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 314).

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lines of this stanza to conclude his chapter on the geological construction of the

British Isles, where they complement his point that the earth’s surface is ‘never at

rest’, but ‘rises and falls, as if it were the breast of some huge monster, slowly

breathing as it sleeps’.60 Again, in The Time Machine, during his return voyage, the

Traveller records that ‘[t]he fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed’.61 In

the National Observer version, he witnesses the hills being eroded: ‘I noticed the hills

grow visibly lower through the years with the wear of gust and rain’.62

In line with the uniformitarian geology of Lyell and others, geological change in The

Time Machine consists of very small changes over vast periods, as opposed to

dramatic changes wrought by violent geological catastrophes. Once the Traveller has

arrived in the world of the Eloi and Morlocks, he notices subtle changes to the

topography. After over eight-hundred-thousand years, ‘the Thames had shifted,

perhaps, a mile from its present position’, and when he reaches the Palace of Green

Porcelain, he ‘was surprised to see a large estuary, or even a creek, where [he] judged

Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been’.63 In the world approaching heat-

death, the Traveller, whose machine has not moved through space, finds himself on

the edge of a sloping beach by a sea.64 A process of geological change has taken place

incrementally over the intervening time-span, much like that highlighted in

Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been

60 Bonney, Planet, 448, 221. In his autobiography, Wells recalls reading Tennyson as a student (Autobiography, i, 194). 61 Wells, Time Machine, 86. 62 Wells, Early Writings, 64. 63 Wells, Time Machine, 28, 64. 64 Wells, Time Machine, 82.

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The stillness of the central sea.65

Bonney also quotes this stanza in his Story of our Planet, and comments that ‘[t]he

poet uttered no dreamer’s words, but simple scientific truth’.66 In Tennyson’s poem,

the poet thinks that ‘where the long street roars, hath been/ The stillness of the central

sea’, whereas in The Time Machine, what had been central London comes in the

distant geological future to be covered by a freezing sea.

The geological aspects of the Traveller’s time travel are developed further in an

abandoned draft chapter of The Time Machine, called ‘The Return of the Time

Traveller’.67 In this chapter, the Traveller returns from ‘the desolate beach of the

dying Earth’, past his present day, and into the remote geological past. He becomes

‘lost in time’, and calls on his geological knowledge to try to locate himself. At first

he worries that he will have travelled so far that what was later land would be sea: the

‘persuasion came into my mind that I should stop when the country was submerged,

& sink plump into the water of some of those vanished oceans whose sediments form

the dry land of today’.68 He fears reaching a time when the land was not yet formed

from the ocean beds, like Playfair’s journey in imagination to a ‘time when the

schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea’, or to Tennyson’s time

when what is now a street had been the ‘stillness of the central sea’. Fortunately,

however, he comes to rest on the bank of a prehistoric river delta. He recounts that: ‘I

peered through the thin haze to see any forms of life that I could identify from my

65 Tennyson, In Memoriam, CXXIII, 192. 66 Bonney, Planet, 222. In the Bonney’s work, the stanza is suggestively juxtaposed with an illustration of the ruined columns of the ‘Temple of Serapis’, which will be discussed below. In his autobiography, Wells recalls his ‘excitement’ at realizing, while standing on the brow of Telegraph Hill in South London and looking across the weald to the North Downs, that ‘I was standing on the escarpment of a denuded anticlinal, and that this stuff of the pale hills under my feet had once been slime at the bottom of a vanished Cretaceous sea’ (Autobiography, i, 112). 67 This chapter is reproduced in Definitive Time Machine, 184-8. 68 Wells, Definitive Time Machine, 184-5.

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geological reading & that would give me some idea of my position in time’. Using his

knowledge of geology, he reassures himself that he will not have to travel through an

oceanic period to return home: ‘I remembered that the deciduous trees came after the

Cretaceous period. At any rate I had not that oceanic period between me & my own

time’.69

However, to the Traveller’s disadvantage, his geological knowledge is comically bad.

He speculates that: ‘[s]o far as my knowledge of geology went this river might be the

great flood that deposited what is now London clay’. Below, in what is perhaps a joke

at his own expense, having failed the geological exam at the Normal School of

Science in 1887, Wells adds a footnote which criticises the Traveller’s supposition:

[t]he Time Traveller’s knowledge of geology was scarcely on a level with his mechanical achievements. A distinguished geologist assures me that this supposition was quite inaccurate. . . . the hippopotamus [which the Traveller encountered] . . . would indicate the much more recent epoch of the Pliocene period.70

Again, the Traveller estimates that he travelled ‘thirty or forty million years’ into the

past, based on the fact that that ‘is the period . . . some geologists give for the London

Clay’, but his supposition is once more undermined by a footnote, which states that

‘[t]he Time Traveller’s geology was extremely elementary’.71

It is not just the geological landscape which changes over deep time in The Time

Machine, but also celestial phenomena.72 The Traveller ‘saw the moon spinning

swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling

69 Wells, Definitive Time Machine, 186. 70 Wells, Definitive Time Machine, 185. 71 Wells, Definitive Time Machine, 186. 72 Bonney writes that, in investigating the remote past, ‘the geologist must lift his eyes from the ground beneath his feet, and look upward to the orbs of heaven and the star-studded region of the sky. He must be content to seek help from the student of physics and the astronomer’ (Planet, 330).

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stars’.73 He witnesses effects of celestial change which had been predicted by George

Darwin’s theory of tidal drag as he journeys further into the distant future:

the sun had ceased to set—it simply rose and fell in the west, and grew ever broader and more red. All trace of the moon had vanished. The circling of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat.74

He is able to watch, as opposed merely to imagine, the earth approaching heat death.

He repeatedly takes

great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away.75

The conceit of having an observer watch the changes around him as he moves through

vast spans of time makes vivid the infinitesimally slow changes of geology and

astronomy. The Traveller contemplates the changes that had occurred over the course

of his journey:

[a]ll the old constellations had gone from the sky, however: that slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings.76

The ‘slow movement’ of the constellations over vast stretches of time, which are

imperceptible to the individual observer, let alone ‘in a hundred human lifetimes’,

become visible to the Traveller on his time machine. This way of concretely

visualizing slow change through vast periods is a fictional equivalent of Lyell’s

geological imagination, and his advocacy of reckoning the ‘myriad of ages’ not

through arithmetical computation, but visually, through trains of physical events.

73 Wells, Time Machine, 19. 74 Wells, Time Machine, 81-2. 75 Wells, Time Machine, 84. 76 Wells, Time Machine, 60-1.

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Romantic Ruins

‘Present state of the Temple of Serapis at Puzzuoli’.77

The world which the Traveller encounters in the year 802,701 A.D. is one of ruins.

Much of the architecture of the future age is neo-Classical: there are ‘huge buildings

with intricate parapets and tall columns’, ‘palace-like buildings’, a seat with arm rests

carved as griffins’ heads and scattered cupolas and obelisks.78 Many of the buildings

are decaying or ruined: the colossal building into which the Traveller is led has a

77 Frontispiece to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) (Principles, i, p.ii). Taken from The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online <http://darwinonline.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=A505.1&pageseq=1> accessed 1 October 2014. 78 Wells, Time Machine, 22, 29, 30.

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richly carved arch with ‘Phoenician decorations’ which ‘were very badly broken and

weather-worn’, and inside, the Traveller observes that ‘the corner of the marble table

near [him] was fractured’. The landscape is overgrown: it is a ‘tangled waste of

beautiful bushes and flowers’ which gives the impression of ‘a long-neglected’

garden.79 There were ‘great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery,

some in ruins’, as well as ‘abundant ruins’, ‘abandoned ruins’, and ‘splendid palaces

and magnificent ruins’.80 Recounting his arrival in the future land, the Traveller

describes ‘the condition of ruinous splendour in which [he] found the world’:

ruinous it was. A little way up the hill, for instance, was a great heap of granite, bound together by masses of aluminium, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumpled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda-like plants—nettles possibly.81

These ‘derelict remains of some vast structure’ had been described as a ‘colossal ruin’

with ‘precipitous masses and confusion of pillars’ in the National Observer version of

The Time Machine.82 The Traveller pursues several of his adventures amongst ruins:

seeking shelter in a ‘colossal ruin’, he clambers among ‘heaps of masonry’, and enters

‘a narrow gallery, whose end and side windows were blocked by fallen masses of

stone’. A Morlock evades the Traveller, hiding ‘in a black shadow beneath another

pile of ruined masonry’; the Traveller pursues this Morlock ‘into [a] second heap of

ruins’, unto an opening ‘half closed by a fallen pillar’.83 Later, the Traveller explores

the ‘Palace of Green Porcelain’, a deserted Victorian-style museum ‘falling into

ruin’.84

79 Wells, Time Machine, 26-7. 80 Wells, Time Machine, 30, 32, 33, 78. 81 Wells, Time Machine, 29. 82 Wells, Early Writings, 78. 83 Wells, Time Machine, 45-6. 84 Wells, Time Machine, 64.

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Patrick Parrinder has advanced an influential reading of these ruins, which he sees as

a key to the time-scheme of The Time Machine.85 He points out that ‘the ruined

buildings of the age of the Eloi and the Morlocks are, however implausibly, culturally

continuous with our own civilisation. The landscape is full of classical motifs:

cupolas, obelisks, fauns, and griffins’ heads, as well as the Sphinx’.86 He goes on to

argue that ‘we can understand The Time Machine better by seeing both an ‘“800,000-

year” and an “800-year” timescale at work in it’: ‘[t]he two scales, those of historical

time measured by the rise and fall of cultures and civilisations, and of biological time

measured by the evolution and devolution of the species, are superimposed upon one

another’.87 The Palace of Green Porcelain’s resemblance to a Victorian museum

places it in the historical timescale, whereas the ‘Eloi and Morlocks could only

emerge within the long perspectives of evolutionary time’.88 For Parrinder, these

timescales, although ‘internally consistent’, are ‘incompatible in certain respects’.89

They ‘come into conflict’ when the Traveller arrives at the Palace of Green Porcelain,

an episode which for Parrinder involves ‘chronological incongruities’.90 While the

Palace would have made sense on the historical time-scale, on the evolutionary

timescale it involves ‘implausibility’: ‘the decay ought to have gone very much

further’.91

85 Parrinder first advanced this argument in Shadows of the Future, and then later in ‘From Rome to Richmond: Wells, Universal History, and Prophetic Time’, in George Slusser, Patrick Parrinder and Daniele Chatelain (eds), H. G. Wells’s Perennial Time Machine (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 110-21. As McLean points out, ‘Parrinder’s idea that there are two timescales at work in The Time Machine [has been] generally accepted’ (Fantasies, 12). 86 Parrinder, ‘Rome’, 116. 87 Parrinder, ‘Rome’, 116; Shadows, 41-2. 88 Parrinder, Shadows, 74. 89 Parrinder, Shadows, 73, 42. 90 Parrinder, ‘Rome’, 116. 91 Parrinder, Shadows, 73.

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Parrinder argues that ‘[w]ithout the 800-year timescale we cannot easily explain such

crucial details as the survival of the unmistakably classical forms of architecture into

the far future’.92 However, the presence of such architecture can be perfectly well-

explained without resorting to an 800-year timescale. It can be explained by reference

to geological literature, and to the tropes of ruin that were widely used by geologists,

including by Thomas Burnet, James Hutton and Charles Lyell, as a means of

imagining geological time. On this reading, we need not see Wells’s future landscape

as an implausible conflation of two different timescales, but rather as the

redeployment of tropes from geological literature in order to imagine a new form of

geological time. Or, if we must follow Parrinder in holding that there are two

timescales in operation in The Time Machine, these can be read not as an ungainly

manipulation of the chronology of the fiction, but as an insight into geological time:

that it has been conceived by geologists as an extension of historical time. The ruins

of The Time Machine can be placed in the context first of Romantic ruins, and then of

ruins in geological literature.

Wells’s future landscape, with its fallen masonry, heaps of overgrown ruins, and

decaying palaces is typical of those which attained great vogue during the Romantic

period.93 There are some details which modernize Wells’s landscape: the ruined heap

of stone is bound together by aluminium, a metal that had begun to be commercially

exploited only in the late nineteenth century; the great hall is paved with blocks ‘of

some very hard white metal’ rather than stone; and the seat with griffins’ heads is

made of ‘some yellow metal’ which the traveller ‘did not recognize’.94 Yet, while

92 Parrinder, Shadows, 42. 93 See Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 94 Wells, Time Machine, 26, 30.

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these details give the ruins a modern or futuristic aspect, they are at the same time

particularly Romantic. More specifically, The Time Machine draws on two Romantic

ruins: those of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818), and of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The

Marble Faun (1860).

The very first thing that the Time Traveller encounters on arriving in the future is ‘[a]

colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone . . . It was of white marble, in

shape something like a winged sphinx’.95 Much critical attention has been devoted to

the sphinx, which Matthew Beaumont describes as ‘an obdurately overdetermined

symbol’.96 As Michael Page has suggested, one such determinant is Percy Bysshe

Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818).97 The verbal echoes between Shelley’s poem and The

Time Machine are marked: Shelley’s ‘colossal wreck’ corresponds to Wells’s

‘colossal figure’; just as Shelley’s statue displays a ‘frown/ And wrinkled lip and

sneer of cold command’, so too is there ‘the faint shadow of a smile on the lips’ of

Wells’s statue; and, as Shelley’s statue displays a ‘hand that mocked’, and bears an

inscription counseling despair, so Wells’s Traveller feels that ‘the sphinx . . . seemed

to smile in mockery of [his] dismay’, and later wakes beneath the sphinx to feel ‘a

profound sense of desertion and despair’.98 The Traveller’s anticipations of future

posterity, like those of Ozymandias, prove misfounded: as he ‘was led past the sphinx

of white marble’, the ‘memory of [his] confident anticipations of a profoundly grave

95 Wells, Time Machine, 21. 96 Matthew Beaumont, ‘Red Sphinx: Mechanics of the Uncanny in The Time Machine’, Science Fiction Studies, 33/2 (July 2006), 230-250, 234. 97 Page, Imagination, 158-9. 98 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 198; Wells, Time Machine, 21, 35, 36.

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and intellectual posterity came, with irresistible merriment, to [his] mind’.99 Shelley’s

‘traveller from an antique land’ becomes Wells’s traveller of the future.

The Ozymandias motif is reinforced when we pair the symbol with perhaps its single

most important determinant: the riddle of the Sphinx of T. H. Huxley’s essay ‘The

Struggle for Existence in Human Society’ (1888).100 In this essay, which John Prince

has suggested contains the answer to the riddle of the sphinx in The Time Machine,

Huxley suggests that the ‘true riddle of the Sphinx’ is to know how to escape from

conditions of evolutionary struggle for existence. Should this fail, he warns of a

polarisation of society into a wealthy positive pole and a miserable poor pole, after

which each nation will ‘sooner or later be devoured by the monster [that it] has

generated’.101 Wells’s society of the Morlocks and Eloi can be interpreted as a

nightmarish imaginative realization of a society which has failed to solve Huxley’s

‘true riddle of the Sphinx’. In this society, which the Traveller at first mistakenly

thinks of as a golden age, humanity has degenerated, and split into two poles: the

decadent and effete Eloi, and the subterranean, cannibalistic Morlocks. The more

distant future bears even less trace of humanity: the Traveller encounters only giant

butterflies and monstrous crab-like creatures. The sphinx statue, combining the two

symbolic senses of Shelley’s arrogance of man and Huxley’s failure to resolve the

evolutionary struggle for existence, thereby stands as a symbol of the arrogance of

man in believing himself to be assured a long evolutionary prosperity.

A second allusion in The Time Machine to romantic ruins is to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 99 Wells, Time Machine, 26. 100 Thomas H. Huxley, ‘The Struggle for Existence in Human Society’, in Evolution & Ethics and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1894), 195-236. 101 John Prince, ‘The “True Riddle of the Sphinx” in The Time Machine’, Science Fiction Studies, 27/3 (Nov. 2000), 543-6; Huxley, ‘Struggle’, 212. See also McLean, Fantasies, 22-3.

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The Marble Faun (1860). In his autobiography, Wells recalls that he began the first

version of The Time Machine ‘very much under the influence of Hawthorne’, and

confesses that certain elements were ‘obviously just lifted into the tale from

Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter’.102 While the elements ‘lifted’ from The Scarlet Letter

(1850) disappear after the first version of The Time Machine, the 1895 versions allude

more subtly to Hawthorne’s later romance, The Marble Faun (1860). The Traveller

recounts a seemingly superfluous detail: that he went ‘past a number of sleeping

houses, and by a statue—a Faun, or some such figure, minus the head’.103 This

headless statue of a Faun is an allusion to The Marble Faun, which is set amidst the

crumbling ruins of Rome.104 In Hawthorne’s romance, one of the principal characters

discovers a ‘headless figure of marble’, and palaces are described as strewn with

‘fragments of antique statues, headless and legless torsos’.105 The faun statue which

Wells’s Traveller encounters suggestively aligns The Time Machine with

Hawthorne’s narrative of the decline of the faun-like Donatello and his family over

time: the past Arcadian ‘Golden Age’ of The Marble Faun is transposed into the far

future in The Time Machine, with the ‘Golden Age’ of the Eloi.106

While the allusions to ‘Ozymandias’ and The Marble Faun reinforce their Romantic

nature, the ruins of Wells’s future landscape can also be placed more narrowly in the

context of tropes of ruin employed in geological literature. Page has usefully

positioned Wells’s ruins at the juncture between science fiction and Romantic

literature. He points out that Wells’s ‘image of ruin’ in The Time Machine both

102 Wells, Autobiography, i, 309. 103 Wells, Time Machine, 60, his emphasis. 104 Parrinder also compares the ruins of The Time Machine to the ruins of Rome, although his preferred source is Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (‘Rome’, 118-20). 105 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, ed. Susan Manning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 328, 31. 106 Hawthorne, Faun, 66; Wells, Time Machine, 44.

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‘becomes central to the vision of science fiction’, noting that ‘[t]he greatest

practitioner of such cosmic visions of ruins is, perhaps, Arthur C. Clarke’, and also

‘reflects on similar images from the Romantic Period’: ‘it is through ruin, as the

Shelleys and their contemporaries well knew, that we can reach the sublime, for ruin

provides us a window into the vastness of historical time’.107 This astute connection

between Wells’s ruins and Romantic ruins can be supplemented with the connection

to ruins in geological literature, many of which were also Romantic ruins.

Tropes of ruin were common in geological literature, and were a nexus around which

ideas of geological time clustered. They form an important part of the ‘geological

sublime’. As part of his wider argument that in the Romantic period, geology and

Romantic literature were mutually constitutive discourses that emerged out of a

shared cultural environment, Heringman has shown that Romantic poets borrowed

tropes of ruin from geologists, and conversely, geologists borrowed back from

Romantic literature.108 Though common in the Romantic period, the trope of the earth

as ruin is older, and can be traced back at least as far as Thomas Burnet’s Sacred

Theory of the Earth (1681) which, as Marjorie Nicolson has shown, had a great

influence on the formation of the natural sublime as an aesthetic category.109

According to Burnet’s physico-theological theory, which stands as an ancestor to

modern geology, the present earth is made of the ruins of a perfectly smooth

antediluvian earth. This former earth had, apparently, been destroyed in a Noachian

deluge: the flood subsided to reveal ‘the true image of the present Earth in the ruines 107 Page, Imagination, 168. 108 Heringman, Rocks, 180-1, 234-6. 109 Nicolson, Mountain, 184-224. The first volume of Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra was published in 1681 in Latin, and in 1684 in English translation; the second volume appeared in 1689 in Latin, and in 1690 in English.

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of the first’.110 Mountains, which ‘are nothing but great ruines’, are implicitly

compared to architectural ruins: they ‘show a certain magnificence in Nature; as from

old Temples and broken Amphitheaters of the Romans we collect the greatness of that

people’.111 Mountains also foreshadow the future ruin of the earth in a fiery

conflagration, and Burnet looks forward to the time when ‘these Ruines . . . will be

burnt up’. For him, ‘Burning Mountains or Volcano’s of the Earth’ are ‘lesser Essays

or preludes to the general fire; set on purpose by Providence to keep us awake, and to

mind us continually, and forewarn us of what we are to expect at last’.112

James Hutton, although theoretically differing greatly from Burnet and his physico-

theology, also figured the earth through tropes of ruin. For instance, in a passage in

his Theory of the Earth (1788) which is quoted in Lyell’s Principles of Geology, he

writes that:

[t]he ruins of an older world are visible in the present structure of our planet, and the strata which now compose our continents have been once beneath the sea, and were formed out of the waste of pre-existing continents.113

For Hutton, these ruins are neither the ruins of a perfectly smooth world caused by a

Deluge, and nor do they point forwards to a fiery conflagration. Instead, they are the

result of natural causes such as erosion occurring over vast periods. In his

popularization of Hutton’s theory, Playfair reinforced the association with ruins, and

set them within an established discourse of the sublime. His Illustrations of the

Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802) describes the lessons which the geologist learns

of time, which are apparently most striking in the Alps. The geologist:

sees himself in the midst of vast ruin, where the precipices which rise on all sides with such boldness and asperity, the sharp peaks of the granite

110 Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: R. Norton, 1691), i, 65. 111 Burnet, Sacred Theory, i, 110. 112 Burnet, Sacred Theory, ii, 271-2. 113 Lyell, Principles, i, 61.

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mountains, and the huge fragments that surround their bases, do but mark so many epochs in the progress of decay.114

By asking us to imagine the geologist in the midst of the Alps, Playfair draws on a by-

then well-established discourse of the natural sublime: his ‘vast ruin’, bold

‘precipices’, ‘sharp peaks’ and ‘huge fragments’ are all drawn from a familiar lexicon

of the natural sublime. He redeploys this lexicon in his imagination of geological

time: his sublime geological ruins ‘do but mark so many epochs in the progress of

decay’.

Lyell made prominent use of ruins in his Principles, most notably with his treatment

of the Temple of Serapis.115 As Rudwick informs us, the so-called Temple of Serapis

at Pozzuoli near Naples had been the source of a lively geological discussion since the

publication of the antiquarian Andrea di Jorio’s Tempio di Serapide (1820).116 In his

Principles, Lyell used the example of the ruined Temple—‘this celebrated monument

of antiquity’—to support his argument that ‘the relative level of land and sea has

changed’.117 By drawing attention to geological change through changes wrought on

the decaying columns of a classical building, and even hypothesizing that ‘broken

fragments’ of the building take part in the geological process of stratification, a close

association is forged between geological and architectural ruins. This association is

reinforced by the frontispiece to the Principles (reproduced above), which depicts a

man meditating on ruins of the Temple of Serapis.118 The choice of frontispiece is apt

114 John Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1802), 111. 115 See also the extended conceit in which he compares geological history to the architectural history of Egypt, with its ‘pyramids, obelisks, colossal statues, and ruined temples’ (Principles, 26-8). 116 Rudwick, Adam, 106-13. Andrea di Jorio, Ricerche sul Tempio di Serapide in Pozzuoli (Naples: Società Filomatica, 1820). 117 Lyell, Principles, i, 449; see 449-59. 118 Lyell, Principles, i, p.ii. This frontispiece is a copy of a very similar illustration from Jorio’s Tempio di Serapide: see Lyell, Principles, i, p.xiv, and Rudwick, Adam, 108, 299. Thomas Allen addresses

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because, as Rudwick points out, Lyell ‘intended to use the case of Serapis, interpreted

as the result of movements of the land in relation to a stationary sea level, as an

epitome of his concept of a ceaselessly dynamic earth’. More importantly, however,

Rudwick makes clear that ‘the picture symbolized Lyell’s intention to use human

history as the key to geohistory’.119

Here, a distinction should be drawn between Hutton’s and Lyell’s conceptions of

geological time. As Rudwick points out, Hutton did not deduce his vast timescale

from observation, but rather conceived of time as a dimension that was stretched

without limit into past and future, in what was in fact ‘a commonplace among

Enlightenment savants’. He argues that Hutton ‘showed no interest in plotting the

particularities of geohistory’, and that ‘[h]owever vast—indeed infinite—[his]

putative timescale, nothing could have been more profoundly ahistorical’.120 By

contrast, Lyell’s Principles made a decisive contribution to what Rudwick calls the

revolutionary ‘historicization of the earth’.121 His use of the Temple at Serapis

encapsulates this process of historicization. The history of the geological changes at

Pozzuoli, whereby the level of the land had risen and fallen over the centuries, and

had periodically caused the Temple to become plunged into the sea, could be

reconstructed in co-ordination with archaeological evidence, and with various eye-

witness accounts of the Temple throughout history. The frontispiece to the Principles

thereby, as Rudwick puts it, ‘neatly encapsulated Lyell’s ambition to integrate

geohistory with human history’.122 Further, we can note that the frontispiece deploys a

Lyell’s frontispiece in discussion of American literature and deep time in his Republic in Time (178-80). 119 Rudwick, Adam, 299. 120 Rudwick, Bursting, 169, 172. 121 Rudwick, Bursting, 7. 122 Rudwick, Adam, 299.

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familiar aesthetic of the sublime. By depicting a solitary Romantic figure

contemplating ruined columns, the frontispiece invites the reader to consider the

work’s conception of geohistory, which stretches back through vast tracts of time, on

the model of a sublime meditation on classical ruins.

The ruins of the future age in The Time Machine invite a form of thought about the

past which is common to both Romantic and geological ruins. Outside the ruined city

of the future, the Traveller contemplates the vast spans of time which he has

traversed, and the changes which have happened during that time:

all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence.123

His meditations in the future age are similar to those of Kenyon in The Marble Faun,

which are typical of Romantic meditations on ruins and on what Page calls ‘the

vastness of historical time’. In Hawthorne’s romance, the ruins of Rome serve as

‘landmarks of time’ which prompt Kenyon to ‘look through a vista of century beyond

century’ towards a past ‘infinitely more remote than history can define’, and to mark

the individual life ‘as nothing’ when set against such an ‘immeasurable distance’.124

The Traveller’s meditations are also similar to those of the solitary Romantic figure

contemplating the ruined columns of the Temple of Serapis in the frontispiece of

Lyell’s Principles.125 Just as Lyell’s frontispiece depicts a man contemplating the

ruins of a classical temple, and thereby prepares his reader to join him in his

meditation on the vast horizons of geological time, so too the ‘ruinous splendour’ of

the world of the Eloi and Morlocks is a suitable destination for the Time Traveller’s 123 Wells, Time Machine, 61. 124 Hawthorne, Faun, 318-9. 125 Wells undoubtedly knew about the Temple of Serapis: he and Gregory referred to it in their Honours Physiography (122). Bonney also discusses this ‘often quoted’ example in his Story of Our Planet, and provides an alternative illustration of the ruined columns (222-6).

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journey through geological time, and his meditation once there on ‘all the years [he]

had traversed’.

Like ruins in geological literature, ruins in The Time Machine provide both the

Traveller and the reader with a means of comprehending the immensity of geological

time, and the course of the earth’s history which unfolds over such time.

Contemplating the stars, the Traveller feels ‘suddenly dwarfed’:

I thought of [the stars’] unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed.126

His contemplation of the ‘unfathomable distance’ of the stars and their slow drift

through great ages is an instance of the astronomical sublime which is, as we have

seen, a close cousin of the geological sublime. Once again, it is fitting that the

Traveller should contemplate deep time from a vantage point outside the ruined city.

Wells takes tropes of ruin from geological literature, and redeploys them in The Time

Machine to imagine deep time.

The connection between architectural and geological ruin in Wells’s romance is most

closely forged through what is arguably the single most important ruin of the future

age: the Palace of Green Porcelain. On his adventures, the Traveller visits the Palace,

a Victorian-style museum which he describes as ‘the ruins of some latter-day South

Kensington’.127 He identifies ‘the Palaeontological Section, and a very splendid array

of fossils it must have been’, and recognizes ‘some extinct creature after the fashion

126 Wells, Time Machine, 61. 127 Wells, Time Machine, 65. Parrinder points out that the Palace of Green Porcelain is modelled on the South Kensington Museum, which Wells visited whilst studying at the Normal School of Science (Shadows, 43-4, 53-5).

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of the Megatherium’ and ‘the huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus’. He also

discovers a gallery ‘devoted to minerals’, and a section which ‘had been devoted to

natural history’.128 As Page points out, the museum has decayed, and become ‘a

sublime ruin’.129 It is described as ‘deserted and falling into ruin’: ‘[o]nly ragged

vestiges of glass remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had

fallen away from the corroded metallic framework’. The Traveller wanders along a

‘ruinous aisle’, and finds that many of the white globe-lamps in a gallery of ‘colossal

proportions’ are ‘cracked and smashed’; in one gallery, the roof of this ‘derelict

museum’ has collapsed.130

By portraying a ruined museum with decaying exhibitions of fossils, minerals and

other geological phenomena, Wells plays on the conventional figuration in geological

literature of geological phenomena as architectural ruins. The decaying geological

exhibits in the museum are not figured as architectural ruins, but rather are housed in

an architectural ruin, and indeed, in a further variation of this figure, the ruined

museum and its exhibits are depicted as undergoing a second-order process of decay.

The dinosaur skeletons and fossils, which themselves are vestiges from the distant

geological past, have, since being exhibited, once again become subject to processes

of decay. ‘The skull and the upper bones’ of the Megatherium-like creature lay ‘in the

thick dust, and in one place, where rain-water had dropped through a leak in the roof,

the thing itself had been worn away’. The Traveller comments that

the inevitable process of decay that had been staved off for a time, and had, through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost ninety-nine hundredths of its force, was, nevertheless, with extreme sureness if with extreme slowness at work again upon all its treasures.131

128 Wells, Time Machine, 64-6. 129 Page, Imagination, 168. 130 Wells, Time Machine, 64, 66, 68. 131 Wells, Time Machine, 64-5, my emphasis.

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The fossils form, as the Traveller puts it, a ‘spectacle of old-time geology in decay’.132

While it plays on figures of architectural decay in geological literature, Wells’s

museum simultaneously operates in the same manner as such figures, by allowing the

processes of architectural and geological decay to be understood by each other. For

example, the Traveller describes how he ‘went through gallery after gallery, dusty,

silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite’. Here, the

juxtaposition of the ‘ruinous’ galleries and decayed exhibits within the course of a

single sentence encourages the association between the two, and invites the reader to

understand both as the products of a common process of decay.133 Again, much as

Lyell had associated architectural and geological decay by suggesting that ‘broken

fragments’ of the Temple of Serapis took part in a geological process of stratification,

so in The Time Machine, the Traveller’s analogy between a jar of camphor and a

fossil aligns the decay of the museum with the process of geological decay:

[i]n the universal decay this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago.134

The jar and the fossil are associated as vestiges of the same process of ‘universal

decay’. As for geologists such as Lyell, architectural and geological decay serve to

elucidate each other.

Ultimately, the ruins of the future age of The Time Machine are more sublime than the

ruins of Lyell’s uniformitarian geology. Though tropes of ruin were common in

geological literature, they functioned variously in different geological works. 132 Wells, Time Machine, 65. 133 Wells, Time Machine, 69. 134 Wells, Time Machine, 68.

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Minimally, to describe something as a ruin implies that it has undergone a process of

decay from a previous state. Yet, as we have seen, theorists understood this process of

decay very differently. For Burnet, it was the result of a violent Noachian deluge,

whereas for Hutton and Lyell, it was the result of presently-acting geological causes,

such as processes of erosion and denudation, operating over long time-scales.

Correlatively, Wells’s ruins should be distinguished from those of uniformitarian

geology. Though both The Time Machine and the geological works of Hutton and

Lyell use ruins to imagine geological time, there are important differences between

the two.

The Time Machine, reflecting later developments in evolutionary biology and

thermodynamic physics, portrays a future very different from those which Hutton and

Lyell had imagined. For both Hutton and Lyell, the processes of ruin to which the

earth is subject are counterbalanced by processes of renewal. For Hutton, even though

the destructive forces of chemical decomposition and mechanical violence wear away

the hardest of rocks, these rocks are subsequently ‘collected at the bottom of the sea’

where they are consolidated and elevated by ‘subterraneous heat’, and are thereby

‘transformed into solid land’.135 This cyclical process of decay and renovation led

Hutton to the famous conclusion of his enquiry into the natural history of the earth:

that we find ‘no prospect of an end’.

Similarly, for Lyell, although geological processes operated over vast time-scales, his

picture of the world was one of uniformity and stability. As Beer puts it, Lyell’s

uniformitarianism ‘suggests continuity, even a kind of permanence, and can be

135 Hutton, ‘Earth’, 261-3; compare Lyell, Principles, 61.

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transformed into covenant and stability’. Lyell’s view of the world is, as she puts it,

‘tranquil’:

[t]he world of forms which the geologist inhabits, the slow phantasmagoria of oceans and continents interchanging, rising and falling as if earth were waves, makes for a tranquil elemental view of the universe, in which time implies an extended scale of existence beyond the span of our minds.136

However, as we saw above, Hutton’s and Lyell’s tranquil views of the universe were

rudely disrupted by later Victorian science, and notably by evolutionary biology,

which raised the possibility that the human species might retrogress and suffer

eventual extinction, and by the second law of thermodynamics, on the basis of which

many foresaw the heat-death of the universe. The vision of deep time in The Time

Machine is a combination of the vastly-extended geological time of Hutton and Lyell,

with a foreshortening and heat-death due to the dissipation of energy which had not

been part of either of their systems.

We saw above that critics have elucidated how the future world which the Traveller

visits is one informed by evolutionary biology and thermodynamic physics. The

world of the Eloi and Morlocks is one in which humanity has degenerated into two

species, while the more distant future in which he finds himself on a frozen beach

assailed by a ‘bitter cold’, is one of a world suffering heat-death.137 What I would like

to add is that these two forms of decay over deep time—biological retrogression and

the mechanical dissipation of energy—become part of the meaning of the ruins which

the Traveller visits. In particular, the sublime nature of the evolutionary and

thermodynamic scenario described in the ‘Further Vision’ feeds back into the sublime

nature of the ruins.

136 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 39. 137 Wells, Time Machine, 84.

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The Traveller’s journey to the desolate beach is one of sublime horror. He finds no

recognizable descendants of humans: not even the degenerate Eloi and Morlocks of

the year 802,701 A.D.. Instead, he encounters a ‘thing like a huge white butterfly’ and

‘monstrous crab-like [creatures]’; travelling further into the future, even this ‘crawling

multitude of crabs’ has disappeared, and the beach appears ‘lifeless’.138 The physical

effects brought about by the dissipation of energy are similarly nightmarish, and the

Traveller watches ‘the life of the old earth ebb away’ with a ‘strange fascination’ that

turns to horror. He describes how a ‘horror of this great darkness came on me’, and of

how in the ‘rayless obscurity’ he was struck by a ‘terrible dread of lying helpless in

that remote and awful twilight’.139 His experience is described in the lexicon of the

sublime—‘obscurity’, ‘horror’, ‘terrible’, ‘dread’, ‘awful’—and adds a sublime

dimension to the deep time of The Time Machine that was absent from Lyell’s

uniformitarian conception of geological time. In turn, the sublimity of the desolate

beach feeds back into the ruins of the future age which stand as monuments to the

deep time of the romance. By foreshadowing the eventual extinction of animal life

and the heat-death of the earth, the ruins of the future age take on a sublimity that was

not part of either Hutton’s or Lyell’s ruins. Rather, by foreshadowing the future

destruction of the earth, Wells’s ruins more closely resemble the sublime ruins of

Burnet’s physico-theological theory. The architectural ruins of The Time Machine are

emblematic of the processes of biological and physical decay, and they anticipate not

138 Wells, Time Machine, 82, 83, 84. 139 This ‘rayless obscurity’ is one of a number of echoes in The Time Machine of Lord Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ (1816), in which the poet dreams that ‘The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars/ Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air’ (The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 272). Page has aptly described Wells’s scientific romances as a synthesis of science and ‘visionary Romanticism’; ‘Darkness’ is one of a number of Romantic poems on which Wells drew in the process in which, as Page puts it, he integrated his scientific training with ‘a visionary imagination nurtured by the Romantic poets’ (Imagination, 150, 155).

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the fiery conflagration imagined by Burnet, but the frozen waste beaches of a slowly

dying earth.

Literary and Geological Fragments

A central thesis of Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983/2000) is that ‘evolutionary

theory had particular implications for narrative and the composition of fiction’. She

argues that: ‘Victorian novelists increasingly seek a role for themselves within the

language of the text as observer or experimenter, rather than as designer or god.

Omniscience goes, omnipotence is concealed’.140 The Time Machine can be placed

within this movement: its narrative can be viewed in light of the geological and

evolutionary theory which shapes so much of its content.

Rather than being a nonfocalized narrative, associated with an omniscient narrator,

The Time Machine is a variable internally focalized narrative, consisting of a frame-

narrative told by a first-person narrator, and the autodiegetic narrative of the Time

Traveller.141 The narratives of the various versions of The Time Machine are, in

different ways, fragmentary. In the National Observer and New Review versions, the

Traveller’s narrative of his voyage into the future is repeatedly interrupted by

objections and comments from his sceptical audience, to the extent that he at one

point breaks off his story.142 We learn how the Traveller was appeased, and ‘produced

some few further fragments of his travel story’.143 In the final version of The Time

Machine, the Traveller’s narrative is presented as a fragment of a greater story, the 140 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 5, 40. 141 Geduld suggests that this narrator is Hillyer, whom the Traveller ‘seemed to see . . . but he passed like a flash’ (Time Machine, 86; Definitive Time Machine, 118). 142 Wells, Definitive Time Machine, 162. 143 Wells, Definitive Time Machine, 163, my emphasis.

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rest of which has been lost by his failure to return from his second voyage. The first-

person frame-narrator relates how he witnesses the Traveller setting out on a second

voyage, with the intention of returning shortly. However, the frame-narrator recalls

how he

stayed on, waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story . . . But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.144

He speculates about the Traveller’s fate:

[i]t may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age.145

Only the Traveller’s narrative of his first voyage remains: it is embedded within the

frame-narrative as the incomplete fragment of a much greater story. Here, I will argue

that the fragmentary form of The Time Machine reflects Charles Lyell and Charles

Darwin’s views of the narratives which could be told about the geological and

biological past.

Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin both stressed that our knowledge of the geological

past is incomplete. In his Principles of Geology, Lyell took great pains to show that

the geological record is incomplete as part of his defence of his ‘doctrine of absolute

uniformity’ against the arguments of the catastrophists. Such incompleteness

supported his conception of a vast past across which geological processes operated

slowly and uniformly, as opposed to the shorter, violent histories of the

144 Wells, Time Machine, 90. 145 Wells, Time Machine, 91.

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catastrophists.146 The Principles, as James Secord makes clear, ‘claimed that any kind

of global narrative would prove impossible to reconstruct, as too much of the record

had been lost’.147

Darwin, drawing on Lyell, also stressed the fragmentary nature of the geological

record in the Origin of Species (1859). He held that ‘the most obvious and gravest

objection which can be urged against [his] theory’ of evolution by natural selection is

that there is no evidence of the ‘innumerable transitional links’ between different

stages of evolving species. His response to this objection was that ‘[t]he explanation

lies . . . in the extreme imperfection of the geological record’.148 For Darwin as for

Lyell, even if our knowledge were perfect, there simply is not evidence to create a

complete record of the past. For example, of the Secondary and Palaeozoic periods,

he pointed out that ‘our evidence from fossil remains is fragmentary in an extreme

degree’. One important reason is that geological formations are ‘separated from each

other by wide intervals of time’, during which no mark is left in the geological record,

and so ‘the geological record will almost necessarily be rendered intermittent’.149 He

also remarked that the imperfection of the geological record was reflected in the

paucity of the palæontological collections of his day:

[n]ow turn to our richest geological museums, and what a paltry display we behold! . . . That our palæontological collections are imperfect, is admitted by every one.150

Bonney reiterated Darwin’s emphasis on the fragmentary nature of the geological

record in the Story of Our Planet. He pointed out that though ‘it is now a quarter of a

146 Lyell, Principles, i, 96-7. 147 James A. Secord, ‘Introduction’, in Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, ed. James A. Secord (London: Penguin, 1997), ix-xliii, xix. 148 Darwin, Origin, 279-80. 149 Darwin, Origin, 288-9, 292. 150 Darwin, Origin, 287.

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century since Darwin wrote that well-known chapter’ on the inherent imperfection of

the geological record in the Origin of Species, and ‘though since that time the labour

of numerous indefatigable writers has filled many a gap and supplied many a link for

which he had vainly sought, yet even now the lacunae are very great, and the

materials at the disposal of the geologist can never be anything but fragmentary’.151

Geologists and natural scientists, including Lyell and Darwin, commonly figured the

incomplete geological record as a fragmentary archive or book. Such figures form

part of a wider phenomenon that occurred as part of the geologists’ historicization of

the earth in which, as Rudwick puts it:

[i]deas, concepts and methods for analyzing evidence and for reconstructing the past were deliberately and explicitly transposed from the human world into the world of nature, often with telling use of the metaphors of nature’s documents and archives, coins and monuments, annals and chronologies.152

As part of this phenomenon, a whole cluster of metaphors and tropes emerged around

the idea of the geological landscape being temporally legible. Lyell, for instance,

contended that the landscape had not always been legible, and that for classical

geologists ‘the ancient history of the globe was . . . a sealed book’.153 Such metaphors

became commonplaces in geological literature. Wells employed his own version to

describe the task of the geologist in his review of Bonney’s the Story of Our Planet.

The geologist, writes Wells,

scrutinizes this round respectable planet of ours with a trained and penetrating eye, and where the common man sees only a haphazard arrangement of hills and valleys . . . he reads, as plainly as if it were print, the story of this or that vicissitude our mother earth has experienced.154

151 Bonney, Planet, 369. 152 Rudwick, Bursting, 6, his emphasis. 153 Lyell, Principles, i, 20. 154 Wells, ‘Reminiscences’, 4. Bonney frequently deployed similar metaphors of the legibility of the geological landscape. For instance, he titled the first part of his work, in which he sets out his central task of telling the ‘story of our planet’, ‘The Story: Its Books and their Speech’ (Planet, 2).

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He later advanced extended variations on this metaphor in his universal histories and

in the Science of Life (1931).155 From such metaphors, it is a short step to figure the

incomplete geological record as a fragmentary archive or book. Lyell makes just this

step when he uses the metaphor of the ‘great chasm in the chronological series of

Nature’s archives’, as does Darwin in the Origin of Species:

[f]or my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept . . . [O]f this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.156

Far from resulting in a complete, universal narrative of the world’s history, the

metaphor of legibility leads to a fragmentary, incomplete ‘history of the world

imperfectly kept’.157 While Rudwick has portrayed the ‘reconstruction of geohistory’

as one in which the ‘eventful narrative of deep or prehuman history first began to be

pieced together’, it is important to realise that for Lyell and Darwin, this narrative

would always be fragmentary.158

The fragmentary narrative form of The Time Machine mirrors Lyell’s and Darwin’s

views of the fragmentary narratives which could be constructed about the geological

past. Just as the geological record provides only a fragmentary record of the history of

the world, so the Traveller’s narrative only provides a fragmentary account of the

future. In a variation on the metaphor of legibility, the frame-narrator of The Time

Machine uses a metaphor of partial illumination to describe the knowledge which the 155 See for example, H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (London: Cassell, 1920), 12-3, and A Short History of the World (London: Cassell, 1922), 11. The metaphor of the geological landscape as a book is developed and sustained through the chapter of the Science of Life entitled ‘The Evidence of the Rocks’ (H. G. Wells, Julian S. Huxley and G. P. Wells, The Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge about Life and its Possibilities, i (London: Amalgamated Press, 1929), 323-419). 156 Darwin, Origin, 310. 157 Similarly, Bonney figured a gap in the geological record as a page having ‘been torn out of the volume’ (Planet, 8). 158 Rudwick, Bursting, 2.

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Traveller’s narrative gives him of the deep future: ‘to me the future is still black and

blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story’.159

Wells later used very similar metaphors of darkness and illumination to describe the

discovery of the remote geological past in The Discovery of the Future (1902).

Whereas previously the remote past had been a blank ‘darkness’, this all changed with

the comparatively recent discovery of ‘the geological past’ by ‘modern science’: rock

formations ‘became sources of dazzling and penetrating light,—the remoter past lit up

and became a picture’.160

In The Time Machine, the description of the future as ‘black and blank’, illuminated at

certain points by knowledge, is a strikingly visual way of thinking of the deep future.

It resonates with a nexus of similar metaphors in geological literature in which the

vast geological past is portrayed as being dark and obscure, and of geological

investigation either illuminating or filling in these gaps. Roderick Murchison, for

instance, whom Wells mentioned in his Autobiography alongside Lyell as one of the

‘great generation’ of geologists, used similar metaphors in his Silurian System (1839).

Therein, Murchison held that, while other geologists contend that ‘as yet we gaze but

dimly into the obscure vista of these early periods’, the present work aims, by

investigating the Silurian system, ‘to fill up an interval of geological history’.161 The

frame-narrator’s description of the deep future as ‘blank’ also echoes Darwin’s

frequent descriptions of the geological past containing blank periods, often of

enormous duration. Darwin writes, for instance, that ‘there will be blanks in our

geological history’, and that ‘between each successive formation, we have, in the

159 Wells, Time Machine, 91. 160 H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future (London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1902), 41, 47, 43, 49. 161 Roderick Murchison, The Silurian System, i (London: John Murray, 1839), 3, 12.

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opinion of most geologists, enormously long blank periods’.162 For the frame-narrator,

the Traveller’s narrative fragment illuminates a few places of the deep future, just as

for Lyell and Darwin, legible geological fragments illuminate sections of the

geological past.

The Traveller’s first-person account of his adventures in the future, which forms the

majority of the narrative of The Time Machine, has survived only by chance. His

adventures form a catalogue of near-escapes: his time machine is captured; he

narrowly escapes from the Morlocks, first in their underground cavern, then in the

woods and finally from their ambush; he escapes from giant crabs; and he only just

manages to avoid fainting and perishing in the far distant future. If any of these near-

escapes had been fatal, the Traveller would not have returned to tell his story. This

narrative logic of chance survival mirrors the chance survival by which part of the

geological record remains to us. It is an analogue to the process by which the jar of

camphor had ‘chanced to survive’ in ‘the universal decay’, and the ink of the

Belemnite had survived despite being fossilized ‘millions of years ago’. Moreover,

the contingency of the narrative logic also reflects the contingency, as opposed to

design, which forms part of the process of evolution by natural selection. As Beer

points out, Darwin in the Origin of Species concentrated on the mechanism of

‘natural’ (that is, non-human and unwilled) ‘selection’ in creating change; unlike

‘artificial selection’, there is no guiding authority which oversees this process.163 The

Time Machine thus formally embodies a logic analogous to that which has led to the

nightmarish consequences of degeneration in the far future. Its narrative reflects a

logic of chance survival as opposed to Providential design, organization, and telos.

162 Darwin, Origin, 173, 284. 163 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 8.

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The other side of the chance survival of the Traveller’s first story is the loss of his

second. The Traveller never returns, and his second story is lost, possibly in the far

reaches of deep time. This loss parallels the loss and extinction which play such

prominent themes in The Time Machine. It reflects the loss and extinction which

characterize both geology, with the loss of a greater part of the fossil record over time,

and of evolutionary biology, with the extinction of species. Wells had meditated on

these themes in his article ‘On Extinction’ (1893). Therein, he reviewed the large

number of species which had once existed but have left no evidence of their time on

earth: ‘[t]he long role of palaeontology is half filled with the records of extermination;

whole orders, families, groups and classes have passes away and left no mark and no

tradition upon the living fauna of the world’.164 Similarly, in The Time Machine, the

Traveller, meditating on the deep time which he has traversed, contemplates ‘all the

traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations’

which ‘had been swept out of existence’.165 In the world of the Eloi and Morlocks,

humans, as well as ‘horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into

extinction’.166

The Palace of Green Porcelain stands as a mausoleum-like testament to the loss and

extinction suffered by the future world.167 In the Origin of Species, Darwin made

vivid the loss and decay suffered by the biological and geological record by

contrasting the ‘infinite number of generations’ that ‘must have succeeded each other

in the long roll of years’ with the ‘paltry display’ that is found even in ‘our richest

164 Wells, Early Writings, 34. 165 Wells, Time Machine, 61. 166 Wells, Time Machine, 27. 167 See Parrinder, Shadows, 53-4.

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geological museums’.168 Wells extended Darwin’s conceit by depicting the already-

poor palæontological collection of a Victorian-style museum as having undergone a

further, second-order process of decay and extinction. While some exhibits have

chanced to survive—the Traveller is surprised to find that a box of matches has

‘escaped the wear of time for immemorial years’—most have not.169 The fossils in the

‘Palaeontological Section’ have experienced further decay since being displayed, and

many other exhibits have fared even worse. The Traveller is disappointed to find in

the natural history section only a ‘brown dust of departed plants’ and a ‘few shriveled

and blackened vestiges of what had once been stuffed animals’. The loss extends to

the literary as well: all that is left of the library in the Palace are ‘brown and charred

rags’—‘the decaying vestiges of books’ which ‘had long since dropped to pieces’.170

These themes of loss and extinction are reflected in the narrative form of the romance.

The loss of one part of the Traveller’s story, and the contingent survival of another,

results in a fragmentary narrative form, and embodies a narrative logic which reflects

the processes and laws operating over deep time in the hostile universe of The Time

Machine.

Cosmic Pessimism

Stephen Jay Gould suggests that Sigmund Freud wrongfully omitted the ‘discovery of

“deep time”’ by geologists from his list of the major blows which science has dealt to

the narcissism of humanity, and to what Gould calls the ‘hope for our own

168 Darwin, Origin, 287. Darwin developed the theme at length in the section titled ‘On the poorness of our Palæontological collections’, pointing out that many of ‘our fossil species are known and named from single and often broken specimens’, and suggests various reasons for this poverty, including the processes of decay which cause soft organisms and even shells and bones to ‘disappear’ (287-8). 169 Wells, Time Machine, 68. 170 Wells, Time Machine, 66-7.

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transcendent importance in the universe’. ‘What could be more comforting’, writes

Gould, ‘than the traditional concept of a young earth’, and ‘[h]ow threatening, by

contrast, the notion of an almost incomprehensible immensity, with human habitation

restricted to a millimicrosecond at the very end!’171

Wells’s The Time Machine is a scientific romance which vividly sets humanity

against the perspective of deep time. The Traveller articulates such a perspective at

the end of the National Observer version: ‘[l]ife is a mere eddy, an episode, in the

great stream of universal being, just as man with all his cosmic mind is a mere

episode in the story of life—’.172 At this point, he is fittingly interrupted by the sound

of his child crying. By situating The Time Machine in the context of geological

literature, I have shown that Wells drew on a tradition of depicting geological time,

and the individual’s relation to that time, through an aesthetics of the sublime. I have

also indicated how the bleak aspects of the romance underpinned by evolutionary

biology and thermodynamic physics feed back into the sublime nature of this deep

time.

Building on the above, I would like to make a further distinction between the sublime

nature of the deep time of The Time Machine and that of Lyell’s geological time.

Lyell’s use of an aesthetics of the sublime to conceptualize geological time ultimately

functions to reconcile humanity’s place in the cosmos. Rudwick argues that Lyell’s

frequent analogy in the Principles of Geology between time and (Newtonian) space

‘added the dimension of geological time to the sublime vision of a universe of perfect

171 Gould, Arrow, 1-2. 172 Wells, Early Writings, 90.

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and wise design, a universe fully under the dominion of providential natural laws’.173

Later, although writing in the era of thermodynamic physics, Archibald Geikie

similarly employed an aesthetics of the sublime to incorporate geological time into a

view of a harmonious (albeit not obviously theistic) world, well-fitted for humanity.

His Scenery of Scotland (1865), to which Wells and Gregory refer their readers in

Honours Physiography, concludes:

scenery . . . leads us back farther than imagination can well follow, and, with an impressiveness which we sometime [sic] can hardly endure, points out the antiquity of our globe. . . . [ I]t is the little changes which by their cumulative effects bring about the greatest results . . . with a nicely balanced harmony and order, forming out of the very waste of the land a kindly soil, which . . . [ministers] to the wants and the enjoyment of man.174

Like Playfair’s famous imaginative journey at Siccar Point, Geikie offers a conceit of

geological time travel which bears classic hallmarks of the sublime: the experience is

almost unendurable, and the imagination is overwhelmed. However, the sublime

impressiveness of geological time leads, for Geikie, to a world of ‘balanced harmony

and order’ which ministers ‘to the wants and enjoyment of man’. The sublimity of

geological time thus serves to heighten the wonder of an orderly and harmonious

world, much as had the natural sublime of eighteenth-century theorists such as Joseph

Addison.175 By helping to reconcile humanity’s place in a harmonious universe, the

sublime nature of both Lyell’s and Geikie’s geological times contrasts with that of the

deep time of The Time Machine. In Wells’s romance, the sublime aesthetic is used to

portray a universe which is anything but hospitable to humanity.

173 Rudwick, ‘Lyell’s Principles’, 33. 174 Archibald Geikie, The Scenery of Scotland Viewed in Connection with its Physical Geology, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1887), 419-20; Gregory and Wells, Physiography, 138. 175 See Nicolson, Mountain, 319-23.

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Mark Hillegas long ago suggested that the bleak vision of The Time Machine is

underpinned by T. H. Huxley’s ‘cosmic pessimism’.176 That Huxley had a decisive

influence on Wells hardly needs reiterating. However, it is worth recalling briefly that

Wells described the year that he spent in Huxley’s class at the Normal School of

Science in 1884-5 as ‘beyond all question, the most educational year of my life’; he

later sent Huxley a copy of The Time Machine in 1895 with an accompanying letter in

which he wrote that ‘[t]he central idea—of degeneration following security—was the

outcome of a certain amount of biological study’.177 In particular, Huxley’s 1893

Romanes lecture ‘Evolution and Ethics’, in which he distinguishes the ‘ethical

process’ from the ‘cosmic process’, and advances his conception of ethical evolution,

has been widely recognized as of seminal importance for Wells’s thought and

writing.178 For instance, Page has recently singled out this ‘late essay’ as of ‘great

significance to the evolutionary vision found in Wells’s early scientific romances’.179

John Partington has convincingly argued that Huxley’s notion of ethical evolution

influenced Wells not just in his early scientific writings but throughout his lifetime,

and indeed, that it decisively shaped his later political commitments, behind which it

stands as ‘the unifying principle’.180 In terms of The Time Machine, critics such as

Hillegas and Page have rightly pointed out that this romance dramatizes the

pessimistic scenario envisaged by Huxley for humanity if it fails to evolve ethically,

and of the inevitable time when, in Huxley’s words, ‘the evolution of our globe shall

176 Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 30, 19; Thomas H. Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’ in Evolution & Ethics and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1894), 46-116. More fully, Hillegas argues that ‘The Time Machine is a bleak and sober vision of man’s place in the universe’, and that ‘[i]t is Huxley’s cosmic pessimism which gives meaning and permanence to this . . . anti-utopia’ (30). 177 Wells, Autobiography, i, 201; letter from Wells to Huxley dated ‘May 1895’, in The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, ed. David C. Smith, i (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), 238. 178 Huxley, Evolution, 81. 179 Page, Imagination, 151. 180 John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 37, 2.

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have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its

sway’.181 The vision of The Time Machine is indeed thereby one of ‘cosmic

pessimism’.

Supplementing the reading of The Time Machine as one of cosmic pessimism, I

would like to draw attention to the role that the deep time of the romance plays in this

vision. Huxley opened the ‘Prolegomena’ (1894) to his essay by invoking the vast

expanses of geological time to unsettle the feeling that nature is somehow permanent.

Though such an air of ‘permanence’ might arise from thinking that ‘the state of

nature’ is essentially unchanging, and that, for instance, many of the same plants that

are found in Britain today would have been found two thousand years ago, this feeling

is deceptive:

measured by the liberal time-keeping of our universe, [the] present state of nature, however it may seem to have gone and to go on for ever, is but a fleeting phase of her infinite variety; merely the last of the series of changes which the earth’s surface has undergone in the course of the millions of years of its existence.182

Making vivid such a perspective on geological time, he points out that to ‘[t]urn back

a square foot of the thin turf’, and to expose the chalk that lies beneath, is to yield

‘full assurance’ that this site was once covered by sea, and that between the time that

this chalk was formed and the turf came into existence, ‘thousands of centuries

elapsed’.183 In the essay, Huxley exploits a similar temporal perspective by quoting

from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1669):

[l]'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l’univers entier s'arme pour l'écraser. Une vapeur, une goutte d'eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand l'univers l'écraserait, l’homme

181 Huxley, Evolution, 45; Hillegas, Nightmare, 30; Page, Imagination, 153. 182 Huxley, Evolution, 2-3. 183 Huxley, Evolution, 3.

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serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt; et l'avantage que l'univers a sur lui, l'univers n'en sait rien.184

The quotation comes from a section of the Pensées that concerns the ‘disproportion of

man’ in the universe, while addressesing the question: ‘in the end, what is humanity

in nature?’185 Pascal depicts humanity as suspended between two extreme scales of

nature: the ‘ultimate microcosm of nature’, and the macrocosm of infinite space:

[w]hoever looks at himself in this way will be terrified by himself, and, thinking himself supported by the size nature has given us suspended between two gulfs of the infinite and the void, will tremble at nature’s wonders.186

He describes such a vertiginous perspective as a ‘new abyss’, and repeatedly records

his terror of vast space: ‘[t]he eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me’.187

However, this perspective is palliated for Pascal by the fact that humanity thinks and

comprehends. One of his previous pensées, entitled ‘Thinking reed’, holds: ‘[i]t is not

in space that I must look for my dignity, but in the organization of my thoughts. . . .

Through space the universe grasps and engulfs me like a pinpoint; through thought I

can grasp it’. Thus, in what might seem like a paradox, Pascal claims that ‘Man’s

greatness lies in his capacity to recognize his wretchedness’.188

Huxley re-situates Pascal’s thought within the context of nineteenth-century natural

science. Whereas Pascal had generated an abyssal perspective by placing ‘man’

against infinite space, Huxley generates a similarly vertiginous perspective by

positioning humanity against vast stretches of geological time. Pascal’s ‘abyss’ of

nature becomes Playfair’s ‘abyss of time’. Further, Pascal provides a fitting precedent

for Huxley’s conception of ethical evolution. Huxley writes:

184 Huxley, Evolution, 115-6; see Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, ed. Anthony Levi, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 72-3. 185 Pascal, Pensées, 66-7. 186 Pascal, Pensées, 67. 187 Pascal, Pensées, 67, 73. 188 Pascal, Pensées, 36.

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[t]he history of civilization details the steps by which men have succeeded in building up an artificial world within the cosmos. Fragile reed as he may be, man, as Pascal says, is a thinking reed: there lies within him a fund of energy operating intelligently and so far akin to that which pervades the universe, that it is competent to influence and modify the cosmic process.189

He here aligns Pascal’s idea that man is a ‘thinking reed’ with his own doctrine of

ethical evolution: that man ‘is competent to influence and modify the cosmic process’.

His citation of Pascal is adroit, given that Pascal made a similar move from man’s

nature as a ‘thinking reed’ to the need to act ethically:

[a]ll our dignity consists therefore of thought. It is from there that we must be lifted up and not from space and time, which we could never fill. So let us work on thinking well. That is the principle of morality.190

Pascal had located man’s dignity in the thought through which he could grasp the

immensity of nature, and had based morality in ‘thinking well’; Huxley similarly put

great faith in the ‘intelligence’ by which humanity could understand the cosmic

process, and could seek to combat it through the ethical process.191

In The Time Machine, Wells generates very similar temporal perspectives to those of

Huxley by situating humanity against vast expanses of geological time. While Huxley

had created such perspectives by gesturing towards the chalk beneath the turf that

indicates the passing of ‘thousands of centuries’, and aligning such a perspective with

Pascal’s vertiginous suspension of man between microcosm and macrocosm, Wells

achieves a similar effect by having the Traveller literally voyage across a sublime

deep time. Wells pits microcosm against macrocosm just as had both Huxley and

Pascal before him. However, in the bleak vision of The Time Machine, there is no

recuperative aspect to such a perspective. Whereas Pascal had salvaged dignity for

man by his ability to comprehend his position in nature, and Huxley had hoped that 189 Huxley, Evolution, 83-4. 190 Pascal, Pensées, 73. 191 Huxley, Evolution, 84.

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through such comprehension humanity could even delay its inevitable cosmic fate,

Wells offers no such consolation. As critics such as Hillegas and Page have shown,

The Time Machine brutally dramatizes humanity’s fate, having failed the Huxleyan

challenge of evolving ethically.

Further, it should be recognized that, as part of this fate, The Time Machine conveys

the loss of humanity’s self-awareness regarding its position in the cosmic process. It

dramatizes the loss of what was, for Huxley following Pascal, the consolation for

humanity for its otherwise wretched position in the universe: the ability to be

conscious of and comprehend that position. For Huxley, science has played a central

role in understanding the cosmic process: ‘a right comprehension of the process of life

and of the means of influencing its manifestations is only just dawning upon us’.192

Such comprehension is in turn a prerequisite for ethical evolution, and the conscious

decision to combat the cosmic process. Yet science, in the age of the Eloi and

Morlocks, has become obsolete. The Traveller meditates on the waste of the Palace of

Green Porcelain’s decayed library, transferring a familiar trope of the futility of all

ambition against the ravages of time (of which he is acutely aware) from the literary

to the scientific:

[h]ad I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the Philosophical Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.193

Moreover, the inhabitants of this future age are oblivious to the significance of the

contents of the decaying museum. The Eloi seemingly have no comprehension of

time. As Sayeau points out, ‘the concept of time itself has become unavailable to the

192 Huxley, Evolution, 84. 193 Wells, Time Machine, 68.

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Eloi’, who fail to understand the Traveller’s attempt ‘to express time’ by pointing to

the sun.194 Comprehension of deep time similarly eludes the Eloi. They do not realise

the significance of the fossils in the Palace, and treat them merely as decorative

objects, forming necklaces from their fragments: ‘[h]ere and there I found traces of

the little people in the shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or threaded in strings

upon reeds’.195 These necklaces are characteristic of their decadent and fading art:

[e]ven [the Eloi’s] artistic impetus would at last die away—had almost died in the Time I saw. To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight; so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more.196

Whereas the Traveller can appreciate the pathos of the Eloi, and their precarious

position in a dying universe, this is an awareness that eludes these decadent and child-

like people of the future, who live forgetfully in what Sayeau calls ‘the amnesiac flow

of the present’.197

The question of the significance or insignificance of humanity, when set against the

perspective of a vast geological time, is in part one of narrative. Paul Ricoeur offers

the following ‘paradox’:

[t]he length of time of a human life, compared to the range of cosmic time-spans, appears insignificant, whereas it is the very place from which every question of significance arises.198

He adds that the ‘full significance of this paradox is revealed only when narrative,

understood as a mimesis of action, is taken as the criterion of meaning’.199 Frank

Kermode accords a similar role to narrative or ‘plot’, which he describes as ‘an

194 Sayeau, Everyday, 132. 195 Wells, Time Machine, 65. 196 Wells, Time Machine, 33. 197 Sayeau, Everyday, 132. 198 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, iii, 90. 199 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, iii, 298.

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organization that humanizes time by giving it form’.200 According to these theories of

narrative, deep time is humanized when the geohistory of the earth is told as a

narrative. As we have seen, the historicization of the earth by geologists opened the

way for such narratives, and the writing of what Rudwick calls ‘deep history’.201

Metaphors of the legibility of the geological record—rocks as books, chronicles,

documents or archives—of which we have seen several examples, are a step towards

the construction of such narratives of deep history, and hence the humanization of

geological time. They suggest that a narrative about the prehuman past lies in the

geological landscape, waiting to be deciphered. However, in The Time Machine,

geological time resists such humanization because of the romance’s fragmentary and

incomplete narrative form. The geological past and future remain sublimely vast and

obscure, and part of a universe inhospitable to humanity.

By contrast, as we shall see in the next chapter, Wells humanizes deep time in his

universal histories by telling the story of the geological past in one continuous

narrative, a feat which he achieves by using Biblical history and Immanuel Kant’s

universal history with a cosmopolitan aim as models. In this new vision, humankind is

no longer depicted as ‘less than an iota in the infinite universe’, to use a phrase from

one of Wells’s earliest short stories.202 Rather, it forms the centre of a world which is

working its way towards a cosmopolitan world state that stands both as the telos of

history, and as its ultimate meaning.

200 Kermode, Ending, 45. 201 Rudwick, Bursting, 2 202 H. G. Wells, ‘A Talk with Gryllotalpa’ (1887), in Early Writings, 19-21, 20.

1.2. Deep History and Wells’s Politicization of Geological Time

‘When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it’.

Friedrich Nietzsche1

While The Time Machine (1895) sets humanity against the perspective of a vast

geological time, H. G. Wells remained concerned with deep time throughout his

career.2 However, there is a marked contrast between his early and his late treatment

of deep time, which corresponds to a change in his view of the position of humanity

within the cosmos.

Jack Williamson has drawn attention to a decisive turning point in Wells’s career at

the turn of the century, with his Anticipations (1901) and The Discovery of the Future

(1902), which constitute the two ‘charter documents of futurology’. He reads Wells’s

entire sequence of early scientific romances as a sustained critique of late-Victorian

ideas of progress, and argues that it was only with his ‘discovery of the future’ at the

turn of the century that he was able to go beyond such a notion of progress, and

launch his career as a prophet of human possibility.3 Indeed, there is an evident shift

in his writing from pessimism to optimism. While most of his early science fiction

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57-124, 94. 2 W. Warren Wagar contends of Wells that it ‘would be difficult to imagine another major literary figure of his generation so intensely conscious of human life on Earth as a process of change over long periods of time, both historical and geological, both past and future. The cosmic scale of his imagination sets him apart from nearly all his contemporaries’ (H. G. Wells: Traversing Time (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 9). 3 Jack Williamson, H. G. Wells: Critic of Progress (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973), 3, 5.

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was ‘darkly pessimistic about our human destiny’, he went on to engineer and

promote ‘a grandly optimistic plan for the future of the race’.4

How are we to make sense of this shift in Wells’s career, in which he overcame his

early cosmic pessimism, and turned from being a critic of progress to being a

champion of progress? Williamson suggests that the change came when Wells

managed to overcome his early Swiftian pessimism.5 More recently, Michael Page

has offered an alternative explanation of the same phenomenon, and argued that this

shift constitutes a return on Wells’s part to a ‘Romantic developmental worldview’,

which he managed to reintegrate ‘into his biological foundations’.6 In this chapter, I

will offer an alternative explanation: that Wells’s movement beyond his early cosmic

pessimism, and his embrace of a progressive scheme for humanity, were driven by his

developing politics. Concentrating on his universal histories, The Outline of History

(1920) and A Short History of the World (1922), I will elucidate the role that deep

time plays in Wells’s politics. I will argue that, whereas deep time in The Time

Machine was depicted as a sublimely vast and terrifying non-human other, in the

universal histories it is recuperated to form part of a vision of a humanized universe.

It forms the backdrop to his very human story of mankind’s progress towards a

cosmopolitan world state. I will explore how, as the deep time of Wells’s histories

becomes humanized, it becomes politicized.

My argument will proceed in four stages. In the first section of this chapter, I will

show that Wells employed Huxleyan perspectives on geological time throughout his

political career, and that he turned such perspectives to his political advantage. In the 4 Williamson, Critic, 5, 124. 5 Williamson, Critic, 5, 23. 6 Page, Imagination, 163.

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second, I will situate his universal histories in the context of geological ‘deep history’,

and show how he gave a teleological shape to his versions of deep history by drawing

on two principal historiographical models: Biblical history and Immanuel Kant’s

universal history with a cosmopolitan aim. Having explored how the continuous

narrative of his histories humanizes deep time in the third section, I will in the fourth

show how such a deep time supports his transnational politics. However, by

contrasting Wells’s approach to long-durational time with that of the historians of the

Annales school, and by revisiting George Orwell’s attack on Wells as the ‘arch-priest

of progress’, I will turn a critical eye on the politics of Wells’s progressive scheme of

history, suggesting that it is guilty of a form of cultural, historical and political neo-

imperialism.

Throughout this chapter, I wish to distinguish the deep time of Wells’s universal

histories from that of The Time Machine. These texts differ greatly, especially in that

the former are histories whilst the latter is fiction. Nevertheless, they can be brought

into productive dialogue through a focus on narrative. To do so I will employ a

methodology similar to those pioneered by both Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur.7 In

particular, I will contrast the different forms of deep time in the universal histories

and in The Time Machine by drawing on Ricoeur’s account of the relation between

time and narrative, and his theory that narrative humanizes time. White and Ricoeur

have done much to bridge the gap between history and fiction through the concept of

7 Hayden White developed an influential ‘poetics of historical discourse’ based around the premise that history and fiction share the same narrative structure. As he put it in Tropics of Discourse (1978): historical narratives are ‘verbal fictions the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences’ (Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore; London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 82). In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur similarly uses narrative as a bridge between historical and fictional discourse: his threefold theory of mimesis is developed as a general theory of ‘emplotment’, which applies equally to historical and to fictional narratives (see Time and Narrative, iii, 99).

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narrative, and have encouraged the reading of history as fiction. Their types of

approach are invited by Wells’s histories, which repeatedly foreground their similarity

to fiction. For example, the Preface to the Short History suggests that the following

historical work is ‘meant to be read straightforwardly almost as a novel is read’.8

Beyond Cosmic Pessimism

In Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells (2003), John Partington

has convincingly argued that T. H. Huxley’s notion of ‘ethical evolution’ decisively

shaped Wells’s politics.9 He argues that Wells, having enthusiastically absorbed and

adopted Huxley’s idea of ethical evolution as a student at the Normal School of

Science, went on to develop a political worldview by fusing this doctrine with an

‘ideological framework’ provided by socialism.10 He shows that Wells first started to

apply Huxleyan ‘ethical’ principles to practical issues of social, educational and

political reform with his Anticipations (1901), and that a commitment to ethical

evolution lay behind all the subsequent stages of his political career. It underpinned

both his support of welfare reform and international co-operation in the Edwardian

period, and his later advocacy of cosmopolitan forms of world government, initially

through pragmatic regional political unions, then later through a functional world

state.11

Although he does not explicitly mention geological time, Partington’s thesis that

Huxley’s notion of ethical evolution underpins Wells’s developing politics implies the 8 H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World (London: Cassell, 1922), v. All further references are to this edition. 9 Partington, Cosmopolis, 2, 30. 10 Partington, Cosmopolis, 31. 11 Partington, Cosmopolis, 3, 43, 149.

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importance of such a time for those politics. Huxley’s ethical evolution involves

viewing humans biologically in a wide temporal frame: such a perspective is required

to appreciate the necessity of combating the ‘cosmic process’ through the ‘ethical

process’.12 Indeed, as Partington points out, Wells held a ‘lifelong Huxleyan belief

that humankind must strive ever upwards to success, or fall ever downwards to failure

and extinction’. He increasingly came to think that such success was to be achieved

through global political union:

he became convinced that the choice for humankind was between global union and human extinction. From 1919 to his death in 1946 Wells actively campaigned for the former, warning against the latter.13

Time and again, Wells confronted his readers with a stark choice which was, in effect,

either to follow his suggestions for a world government, or face extinction. It is worth

making explicit the role that deep time plays in such a political strategy, and,

conversely, showing how Wells’s approach to deep time became increasingly

political.

Wells repeatedly draws attention to the discovery of geological time in political

contexts. A revealing early example is his lecture given at the Royal Institution and

published in book form as The Discovery of the Future (1902).14 Warren Wagar has

celebrated this work as one of the founding documents of ‘future studies’, arguing

that ‘it is not far-fetched to fix January 24, 1902, the day of Wells’s Royal Institution

lecture, as the day when the study of the future was born’.15 It should also be pointed

out that this work forms a key step in Wells’s politicization of geological time, and

12 Huxley, Evolution, 81, 84. 13 Partington, Cosmopolis, 118, 109. 14 H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future (London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1902). Unless otherwise specified, all further references are to this edition. 15 W. Warren Wagar, ‘H. G. Wells and the Genesis of Future Studies’, World Future Society Bulletin, 17/1 (January/February 1983), 25-9, 26; see also his Traversing Time, 37, 283-4.

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marks a crucial transition between his early cosmic pessimism and his later political

writings.

In The Discovery of the Future, Wells invokes the comparatively recent discovery of

the geological past to argue for the possibility of an analogous ‘discovery of the

future’. He points out that ‘until the nineteenth century began’, man’s knowledge of

the past was ‘absolutely confined’ to the domain of human history and tradition, and

formed part of a picture rounded off by ‘legend and error’, such as by Bishop

Ussher’s dating of creation in ‘exactly four thousand and four years B.C.’: ‘that was

man’s Universal History . . . until the scientific epoch began’.16 However, with the

‘great discovery’ of the geological past, ‘modern science . . . abolished such limits to

the past’: ‘[w]e have become possessed of a new and once unsuspected history of the

world’.17 He goes on to develop a sustained analogy between the discovery of the

geological past and his proposed ‘discovery of the future’, to support his argument for

the possibility of the latter:

by seeking for operating causes instead of for fossils, and by criticising them as persistently and thoroughly as the geological record has been criticised, it may be possible to throw a searchlight of inference forward instead of backward, and to attain to a knowledge of coming things as clear, as . . . the clear vision of the past that geology has opened to us during the nineteenth century.18

The analogy is underpinned by Wells’s claim that knowledge of the future would be

obtained through similar inductive inferences to those which were employed to obtain

knowledge of the geological past. Rhetorically, he presents his proposed ‘discovery of

the future’ as one which involves a shift of attention from the past to the future—from

the ‘inductive past of geology’ to the ‘inductive future’—but in truth, his interest lies

16 Wells, Discovery, 41-2. 17 Wells, Discovery, 48, 43, 46. 18 Wells, Discovery, 50-1.

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in both past and future: that is, in deep time, and in the long-term processes such as

biological evolution and thermodynamic decay that operate over such time spans.19

The nascent political aspect of Wells’s approach to deep time in the Discovery of the

Future should be stressed. It is clearly revealed by the opening contrast which he

draws between ‘two divergent types of mind’ that are to be ‘distinguished chiefly by

their attitude towards time’: one that ‘seems scarcely to think of the future at all’, and

another that ‘thinks constantly, and by preference, of things to come, and of present

things mainly in relation to the results that must arise from them’. Wells describes this

latter type of mind as

the legislative, creative, organising, or masterful type, because it is perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things, perpetually falling away from respect for what the past has given us. It sees the world as one great workshop, and the present is no more than material for the future.20

This sketch, which serves as a good description of Wells’s own mind, and of his

indefatigable political activities over the next four decades, makes clear the political

element of the concern with the future: the desire to legislate, create, and organize in

order to attack and alter ‘the established order of things’. Indeed, what Wells here

calls ‘the scientific discovery of the future’ or ‘[s]cientific prophecy’, a method which

animates many of his non-fictional ‘futurological’ works, aims not simply to predict

what will happen in the future, but also to alter that future through political

measures.21 Already in the Discovery of the Future, Wells makes the prediction that

there will be ‘a great world state’:

[i]t is not difficult to collect reasons for supposing, and such reasons have been collected, that in the near future—in a couple of hundred years, as one

19 See Wells, Discovery, 77, 87. 20 Wells, Discovery, 7-8, 10. 21 Wells, Discovery, 79, 71.

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rash optimist has written— . . . humanity will be definitely and consciously organising itself as a great world state.22

The ‘rash optimist’ to which Wells points with self-deprecating humour, is, of course,

himself. As Partington points out, he first began constructing tentative proposals for

the development of future society with the publication of Anticipations (1901), which

contains his first non-fictional reference to a world state.23 The early mention of a

world state in this lecture shows the political impetus which lies behind the ‘discovery

of the future’, and anticipates his sustained political campaign to achieve such a world

state.

The Discovery of the Future marks a key point of transition between Wells’s early

cosmic pessimism and his later Huxleyan political worldview. Therein, he deploys a

classic Huxleyan perspective on geological time to make the point that humanity

occupies a precarious position in the universe, and, in this particular instance, to

chastise Auguste Comte and his Positivist followers for their complacent belief in the

supremacy of humanity. ‘[W]e of the early twentieth [century]’, writes Wells, and

‘particularly that growing majority of us who have been born since the Origin of

Species was written’, look ‘back through countless millions of years’:

[o]ur imaginations have been trained upon a past in which the past that Comte knew is scarcely more than the concluding moment, we perceive that man, and all the world of men, is no more than the present phase of a development so great and splendid that, beside this vision, epics jingle like nursery rhymes, and all the exploits of Humanity shrivel to the proportion of castles in the sand.24

Having deployed such a perspective, Wells goes on to negotiate a cautiously

optimistic path, whose tension with his earlier cosmic pessimism is apparent. On the

one hand, he optimistically presents his ‘great world state’, carefully differentiated 22 Wells, Discovery, 80-1. 23 Partington, Cosmopolis, 2, 1. 24 Wells, Discovery, 76-7.

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from a static Positivist utopia, as an enticing goal for humanity: a ‘world state’ that

‘glitters elusively’ in the future. Yet on the other hand, he points out that such faith in

the future involves the ‘quite arbitrary belief’ that life is not ‘in vain’, and that it is

scientifically perfectly possible that something should occur which would ‘utterly

destroy and end the entire human race and story’.25 He imagines in lurid detail a

number of scenarios which could bring about such a cosmic disaster: the earth could

be destroyed by an asteroid, humanity could be wiped out by disease, poisoned,

hunted, and so on. Added to these possibilities is the certainty that the sun ‘must some

day radiate itself towards extinction’. These are, of course, exactly the sorts of

pessimistic cosmic scenarios which were envisaged in his early scientific romances.

Notably, his description of the sun radiating itself towards extinction until the point at

which ‘this earth of ours, tideless and slow moving, will be dead and frozen’, is the

scenario of The Time Machine.26 However, in the Discovery of the Future, Wells

makes a decisive movement away from such pessimism:

I do not believe in these things, because I have come to believe in certain other things, in the coherency and purpose in the world and in the greatness of human destiny.27

Throughout the lecture, Wells counterbalances his earlier cosmic pessimism with his

newly-found sense of purpose: though ‘shot with pain’, the world is also ‘shot with

promise’.28

As critics such as Wagar, Williamson, John Reed and Partington have pointed out,

Wells throughout his life maintained an acute awareness of the precariousness of

25 Wells, Discovery, 81-2, 84. 26 Wells, Discovery, 87. 27 Wells, Discovery, 87-8. 28 Wells, Discovery, 89.

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humanity, and of its possible extinction.29 Indeed, conveying such a precariousness

feeds back in to his Huxleyan politics, and provides an urgency for the political steps

which supposedly need to be taken to avoid cosmic disaster. What is significant is that

in the Discovery of the Future, the bleak cosmic pessimism of the earlier scientific

romances is counterbalanced by a new sense of purpose for humanity, and that

already at this early stage, this purpose is directed towards the political formation of a

world state.

While predominantly political, Wells’s movement beyond his early cosmic pessimism

also reflects a major change in the scientific understanding of cosmology. This

change, whose significance for Wells’s thought has been indicated by Patrick

Parrinder, occurred with the discovery of radioactivity at the turn of the century. As

Parrinder points out, the study of radioactivity revealed the source of the sun’s heat to

be thermonuclear fusion rather than combustion, and so discredited predictions of a

relatively imminent heat-death as a consequence of the second law of

thermodynamics.30 In the Interpretation of Radium (1909), Frederick Soddy clearly

articulated the cosmological consequences of the discovery of radioactivity, holding

that ‘[w]e are no longer the inhabitants of a universe slowly dying from the physical

exhaustion of its energy, but of a universe which has in the internal energy of its

material components the means to rejuvenate itself perennially over immense periods

of time’.31 As Parrinder notes, Wells switched ‘shortly before the First World War

from entropic pessimism to a position much closer to Soddy’s thermonuclear

29 W. Warren Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State (Freeport, N. Y: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 82; Williamson, Critic, 27, 38; John Reed, The Natural History of H. G. Wells (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982), 96; Partington, Cosmopolis, 5. 30 Parrinder, Shadows, 39-40. 31 Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium: Being the Substance of Six Free Popular Experimental Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1908, 3rd edn (London: John Murray, 1912), 248.

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optimism’.32 The eleventh chapter of Interpretation of Radium so inspired Wells that

he wrote a novel on its basis: The World Set Free (1914).33 He also later apologised

for the ‘incorrect science’ of The Time Machine in his 1931 preface to that work:

[t]he geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the ‘inevitable’ freezing up of the world—and of life and mankind with it. The whole game of life would be over in a million years or less. They impressed this upon us with the full weight of their authority, while now Sir James Jeans in his smiling Universe Around Us waves us on to millions of millions of years.34

The discovery of radioactivity undoubtedly had a large influence on Wells. It would,

however, be misleading to think that ‘thermonuclear optimism’ alone freed him from

the shackles of his cosmic pessimism. Rather, the case of the Discovery of the Future

suggests that Wells had already began to move beyond his early cosmic pessimism in

order to adopt a more politically-efficacious view of the cosmos.

When he gave his lecture in 1902, Wells still believed The Time Machine scenario of

a thermodynamic heat-death to be inevitable. He held it to be a ‘certainty’ that the sun

must radiate itself towards extinction.35 In the second edition of the work of 1913, he

added a footnote to this statement, which reads: ‘[n]ot now. This lecture was delivered

ten years ago and the discovery of radio-activity has changed all that’.36 While this

shows that by 1913 he had abandoned his earlier belief in the inevitable heat-death of

the earth, what is more important to note is that, when he first gave his lecture in

1902, he was determined not to let this belief compromise his new-found confidence

in the progress of humanity. Letting this latter confidence override the forecast of

32 Parrinder, Shadows, 47. 33 Wells dedicated this novel to Soddy’s Interpretation of Radium, and acknowledged that his story ‘owes long passages to the eleventh chapter of that book’ (The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind (London: Macmillan, 1914), v). 34 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: Random House, 1931), ix-x. 35 Wells, Discovery, 87. 36 H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future, 2nd edn (London: A. C. Fifield, 1913), 55.

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heat-death, he forced himself to the statement that ‘[e]verything seems pointing to the

belief that we are entering upon a progress that will go on with an ever widening and

ever more confident stride for ever’.37

Having formed a political worldview on the basis of Huxley’s ethical evolution, Wells

continued to use Huxleyan perspectives on geological time to his political advantage

throughout his career. For instance, the Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939) finds Wells still

pedalling his world community—by then understood in its mature theoretical form as

a functional world state—as a necessary measure in order to save humanity from

‘biological disaster’.38 The threat had, in this instance, been raised by the recent rise

of Nazism and the prospect of a second world war.39 In his second chapter, Wells

draws attention to the ‘modification of time values that has occurred’ between a

‘modern intelligence to-day’ and ‘the outlook of our grandparents’. Whereas the

earlier generation had ‘scarcely any historical perspective at all’, and ‘looked back to

a past of a few thousand years and at the very beginning of time as they conceived it’,

members of the newer generation have very different ‘historical imaginations’. They

‘live to-day in a vastly enlarged system of perspectives’: ‘[o]ur historical ideas reach

back now through vistas of millions of years’.40 In typical Huxleyan fashion, this new

perspective is used to unsettle the idea of an ‘unchanging human nature’: as ‘our

perspectives open’, we discover that the fixity of human nature ‘was a transient

dream’.41 Indeed, Wells employs the same example of ‘everlasting hills’ to illustrate

37 Wells, Discovery, 92. 38 H. G. Wells, The Fate of Homo Sapiens (London: Secker & Warburg, 1939), 79. Partington argues that, while unstinting in his advocacy of a world state, Wells moved from a pragmatic support of various forms of regional unification in the aftermath of the First World War, to developing a functionalist theory of world government, which he championed from 1932 until his death in 1946 (Cosmopolis, 109, 101-26). 39 Wells, Fate, 180, 296. 40 Wells, Fate, 22-4, his emphasis. 41 Wells, Fate, 23, 25.

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the new ‘system of perspectives’ as had Huxley in Evolution and Ethics (1894).

While Huxley had written that to ‘[t]urn back a square foot of the thin turf’ and to

expose the chalk formations beneath is to show that the supposedly ‘“everlasting

hills”’ have in fact undergone drastic changes over the course of geological time, so

Wells writes that we now ‘know that the everlasting hills are not everlasting’.42

Characteristically, Wells goes on to exploit this perspective on geological time, and

the precariousness of humanity within such a perspective, to his political advantage.

He argues that in order to avoid extinction, everyone must ‘be re-educated as a

conscious world citizen’, and must ‘be prepared to take his place in a collective world

fellowship’.43

Wells’s universal histories, The Outline of History (1920) and A Short History of the

World (1922), play a central role in his Huxleyan politics, and constitute his most

sophisticated political articulation of deep time.44 While, as we have seen, he was

willing throughout his career to invoke Huxleyan perspectives on geological time to

political ends, his readers could best be persuaded to adopt his biological perspective

if they were provided with a universal history which told the story of humanity

against the backdrop of deep time.

Wells’s universal histories can be positioned at a decisive juncture in his political

development, as he moved from being an ‘internationalist’ to being a ‘cosmopolitan’. 42 Huxley, Evolution, 3; Wells, Fate, 24. 43 Wells, Fate, 79. The stark choice that Wells leaves his readers is: ‘[a]dapt or perish’ (312). 44 The Outline of History was first published by George Newnes in twenty-four fortnightly parts between November 1919 and November 1920, and first appeared in book form in 1920, in an edition published by Cassell. Revised and updated editions were published in 1925, 1930, 1932, 1951, 1961 and 1972; the last two of these editions contain revisions made by Raymond Postgate and G. P. Wells. A Short History of the World was first published in 1922 by Cassell, and a revised edition was published in 1946. For an account of the Outline’s complex publication history, see Matthew Skelton, ‘The Paratext of Everything: Constructing and Marketing H. G. Wells's The Outline of History’, Book History, 4 (2001), 237-75.

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While his entire political career was governed by a commitment to Huxley’s ethical

evolution, Partington charts a crucial shift in his political outlook at the end of the

Great War, at which point he replaced his earlier internationalism with a commitment

to a cosmopolitan government: ‘[f]rom this time onwards he sought the supersession

of nationalist sentiment in favour of a more tolerant cosmopolitanism which advanced

world citizenship and collective responsibility’.45 As Wells himself stressed,

‘cosmopolitanism is something entirely different from internationalism’.46 Whereas

internationalism seeks the co-operation between nation-states whose structure it

leaves in tact, cosmopolitanism seeks to dismantle the nation as a sovereign political

entity, and to replace it with an entirely new and wider form of political community.

While Wells’s internationalism had manifested itself in his support of a ‘League of

Free Nations’, he was, as the Outline makes eminently clear, bitterly disappointed

with the eventual formation of the League of Nations as it was embodied in the

Covenant of 28 April 1919. From this point onwards, he advocated a cosmopolitan

world government.47 Indeed, Partington accords the Outline a decisive role in Wells’s

movement to his new cosmopolitan politics. Although ‘Wells first considered world

unity during the Edwardian period, it is nonetheless possible to consider The Outline

of History as Wells’s manifesto launching his career as publicist for world peace and

cosmopolitan unity’.48

Wells’s universal histories and his concomitant proposed reform of history teaching

were eminently political. His need of history was not that—to use Nietzsche’s

45 Partington, Cosmopolis, 82. 46 H. G. Wells, After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation (London: Watts, 1932), 55. 47 H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (London: Cassell, 1920), 590-4, 603. Unless otherwise specified, all further references are to this edition. 48 Partington, Cosmopolis, 109.

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terms—of the ‘idler in the garden of knowledge’, but rather was ‘for the sake of life

and action’.49 He made no secret of the political nature of his approach to history.

Both of his universal histories clearly advertised their political aims of countering

nationalism and of providing readers with a common scheme of world history to

prepare them for their role as citizens in the coming world state. For example, in the

preface to the Outline, he flagged the urgent need of ‘common historical ideas’ to

ensure a world peace:

[t]here can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world . . . But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas. Without such ideas to hold them together in harmonious co-operation, with nothing but narrow, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction.50

Moreover, he embarked on a relentless campaign for the replacement of the teaching

of national history with world history, initially in works such as The New Teaching of

History (1921) and The Salvaging of Civilization (1921), and later in works such as

‘The Poison Called History’ (1939).51 Once again, he made no attempt to conceal the

politics of this campaign, clearly indicating that his proposed reform of history

teaching was designed to help bring about his desired world state. As he put it,

‘[w]orld federation and the teaching of world history are two correlated and

inseparable things’.52

49 Nietzsche, ‘History’, 59. 50 Wells, Outline, vi; his emphasis. 51 H. G. Wells, The New Teaching of History (London: Cassell, 1921); The Salvaging of Civilization (London: Cassell, 1921); ‘The Traveller Provokes his Old Friends, the Teachers, Again in a Paper Called “The Poison Called History”’, in Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), 89-121. Partington has usefully situated Wells’s proposed reform of history teaching within the context of his wider post-war project of educational reform, which aimed to create ‘the cosmopolitan citizenry which [he] felt was essential for the achievement of his world state’ (Cosmopolis, 88). 52 Wells, Democracy, 170.

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In the remainder of this chapter, I will address the role that deep time plays in Wells’s

universal histories and in his advocacy of world history, while showing how such a

time is central to his cosmopolitan politics. On the face of it, it may seem surprising

that deep history and the prehuman past could be political. What could be less

political than the emergence of life on the steaming beaches of the remote geological

past, primitive reptiles venturing out from their swamp-forests in the Late Palæozoic

Age, and herds of early mammals roaming the earth in the Cainozoic period? Such

things predate humans, and may therefore appear equally remote from human affairs,

let alone from contemporary politics. However, I will show in what follows that Wells

exploited both geological time and the prehuman past for his cosmopolitan politics.

The Shape of Deep History

‘The destination of the human species as a whole is towards continued progress. We accomplish it by fixing our eyes on the goal, which, though a pure ideal, is of the

highest value in practice, for it gives a direction to our efforts’.

Immanuel Kant53

H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History (1920) and A Short History of the World (1922)

are universal histories which tell the story of the earth and its inhabitants from its

creation in the remote past up until the present day. Both sold widely: by the time

Wells published his autobiography in 1934, the Outline had sold over two million

53 F. S. Marvin used this quotation, along with the attribution ‘KANT, Criticism of Herder, 1785’, as an epigram in The Living Past: A Sketch of Western Progress (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 217. See Immanuel Kant, ‘Review of J. G. Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity. Parts 1 and 2’ (1785), trans. Allen W. Wood, in Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 124-42, 142.

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copies.54 Although Wells was keen to make clear that the Short History was ‘not an

abstract or condensation’ of the Outline, but rather ‘a much more generalized History,

planned and written afresh’, both works share a similar structure; indeed, he suggests

that the Short History can be used as preparatory reading for the ‘much fuller and

more explicit Outline of History’.55 Paul Costello has usefully placed the Outline and

Short History within a tradition of twentieth-century universal history or ‘world

history’ that includes Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918-22) and

Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934-61), and which in turn forms part of a

longer tradition of universal history that stretches back to the Bible.56 World histories

are, as Costello puts it, schematic attempts ‘to specify the pattern of the past from

earliest recorded time to the present’.57 Here, I would like to re-situate Wells’s

histories in the context of geological ‘deep history’, and show how they deliberately

appropriate the prehuman past which was brought to light by geologists.

Martin Rudwick has drawn attention to the importance of the new conceptions of

‘deep history’ that emerged with the discovery of geological time. He makes clear

that what was significant about the discovery of deep time was not simply the

magnitude of the new timescales, but also the construction of what he calls the ‘deep

history’ that ‘fills up the vast tracts of deep time’, and the profound change that came

about from ‘regarding human history as almost coextensive with cosmic history, to

treating it as just the more recent phase in a far longer and highly eventful story,

54 Wells, Autobiography, 615. On the marketing and commercial success of the Outline, see Skelton, ‘Paratext’. 55 Wells, Short History, v. 56 Paul Costello, World Historians and their Goals: Twentieth-Century Answers to Modernism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), 9-45. Wagar has also situated Wells’s histories within the tradition of universal history: see his World State, 137-42. 57 Costello, World Historians, 9.

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almost all of it prehuman’.58 Indeed, as Rudwick has shown, the idea of a vast

timescale of the earth was not by itself revolutionary. He complicates the popular but

misleading view that what ‘the emergence of the modern earth sciences needed above

all’ was ‘an adequate sense of the vastness of geological time’ and that ‘this is just

what was lacking until at least the turn of the nineteenth century’ by demonstrating

that modern geology displaced two major positions. The first is that of practitioners of

the historical science of chronology who adhered to the ‘traditional short timescale’.

The most famous example of this position is Bishop Ussher’s dating of Creation in

4004 B.C. based on his interpretation of Biblical history. However, there was another

alternative which had already challenged the traditional short timescale: the

‘eternalism associated with Aristotelian philosophy’.59 As Rudwick points out,

‘eternalist ideas persisted in European culture largely as an “underground”

alternative’. For example, the anonymous and notorious Telliamed (1748) postulated

a timescale of millions of years for the earth, which in turn was interpreted as just one

phase in an even longer cyclic movement from, and to, all eternity. Consequently,

what was decisive about the modern geology was not simply its positing of a longer

timescale, but rather the idea that there was a long period of the earth’s history which

preceded the emergence of humanity:

[t]he eternalist view assumed that there had never been a time when the world was without human or at least rational life; it allowed for no conception of a prehuman and therefore radically nonhuman world. In that sense, the eternalist option was as profoundly unmodern as the short timescale.60

58 Rudwick, Bursting, 2, his emphasis. 59 Rudwick, Bursting, 115-7, emphasis removed. As we saw above, Rudwick positions James Hutton in this tradition of eternalism. 60 Rudwick, Bursting, 118, his emphasis.

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That is, modern geology is notable for its introduction of the novel idea of a vast

prehuman past, and for raising the ‘prospect of extending detailed and reliable history

back into a prehuman world’.61

Wells draws attention to the geologists’ discovery of the deep history of the earth in

his histories. He emphasizes the abandonment of what Rudwick calls the short

timescale, the realization of the vastness of the prehuman past, and the piecing

together of the earth’s geohistory. After an opening chapter which situates the earth in

space and time, Wells points out in the second chapter of the Outline, called ‘The

Record of the Rocks’, that the ‘fossils in the rocks and the rocks themselves are our

first historical documents’ and that by ‘studying this record men are slowly piecing

together a story of life’s beginnings’. Much as Charles Lyell had done before him, he

remarks that the record of the rocks has not always been recognized as such, and that

‘it has been only within the last century and a half that man has begun the serious and

sustained deciphering of these long-neglected early pages of his world’s history’.62 He

draws attention to the fact that ‘[s]peculations about geological time vary

enormously’: ‘[e]stimates of the age of the oldest rocks by geologists and

astronomers’ have ranged from between 25,000,000 and 1,600,000,000 years, with

Lord Kelvin making the lowest estimate in 1867 and T. H. Huxley guessing at

400,000,000 years.63 Wells stresses that ‘whatever the total sum may be’, it is

important to realise that there was a time period of great duration before any

significant life developed: ‘most geologists are in agreement that half or more than

61 Rudwick, Bursting, 2. 62 Wells, Outline, 7, 8; Lyell, Principles, i, 20. Wells provides an account of the discovery of geological time in his chapter on the nineteenth century: see Outline, 520-2. 63 Wells, Outline, 8. Wells refers the reader to Arthur Holmes’s The Age of the Earth (1913) as an ‘admirable recent book’ that provides ‘a good summary of this most interesting discussion’ (8).

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half of the whole of geological time had passed before life had developed to the Later

Palæozoic level’.64 The Short History opens by pointing out that

[a] couple of hundred years ago men possessed the history of little more than the last three thousand years. . . . Over a large part of the civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had been created suddenly in 4004 B.C..65

However, this ‘misconception’ which ‘was based upon a too literal interpretation of

the Hebrew Bible’ has ‘long since been abandoned’: that ‘the universe in which we

live has existed only for six or seven thousand years may be regarded as an altogether

exploded idea’. Rather, it is now ‘universally recognized that the universe in which

we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period of time and possibly for

endless time’.66

Wells’s histories are themselves versions of deep history. They fuse the deep

historical narratives of geologists with a scheme of universal history. The early

chapters of the histories are highly-condensed versions of the ‘deep histories’ offered

by geologists.67 In the Outline, Wells acknowledged his debt to a number of

geological textbooks and popular geological works, to which he refers his readers for

further information. For example, in addition to acknowledging the debt of his

opening six chapters to Charles Lyell’s, Alfred Jukes-Browne’s, and Louis Pirsson

and Charles Schuchert’s ‘textbooks of geology’, he refers his readers to the essays

collected in Richard Lull’s The Evolution of the Earth and its Inhabitants (1918) and

Henry R. Knipe’s Evolution in the Past (1912).68 This last work follows what had

become a well-established pattern of telling the story of the earth in a chronologically-

64 Wells, Outline, 8, his emphasis. 65 Wells, Short History, 1. 66 Wells, Short History, 1. 67 In the Science of Life (1929-30), H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G. P. Wells offered a much fuller account of the earth’s geohistory and its evolving life forms: see Science of Life, i, 202-27; ii, 429-549. 68 Wells, Outline, 24, 5.

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ordered narrative form. The opening chapters of Wells’s universal histories, which tell

the story of the earth’s remote past, are compact versions of such an approach.

Unlike Knipe’s natural scientific account of the earth’s geohistory, Wells’s narratives

of the prehuman past also form part of a scheme of universal history. This inclusion

of the geological past into a scheme of universal history is notable, though not without

precedent. For example, both Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man (1872) and F. S.

Marvin’s The Living Past: A Sketch of Western Progress (1913), which Wells

acknowledges as previous ‘sketches of universal history’ that influenced his Outline,

advance narratives of the newly-opened geological past.69 Marvin, for instance,

signaled that ‘a scientific geology [has] opened the book of man’s earliest history’,

and that

[t]he new discoveries enable us to plan out the vast tract of geologic time, compared with which historic time is but a minute in a day, and in rough outline to sketch the main features of human development.70

While Wells wrote versions of deep history, what needs to be stressed is the particular

organization or shape that he imposed on that deep history. What is significant is not

just his incorporation of the geological past, but the role that that past is made to play

in his progressive scheme of history.

Wells’s deep histories are teleological. They tell the story of humanity as one of

progress from a common biological origin in the remote geological past towards the

telos of a coming world state. ‘[C]lumsily or smoothly’, we are told, ‘the world . . .

progresses and will progress’.71 The last book of the Outline, called ‘The Next Stage

in History’, looks forward to this coming world state: ‘[o]ur Outline of History has 69 Wells, Outline, vi. 70 Marvin, Living Past, 11, 12. 71 Wells, Outline, 608.

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been ill written if it has failed to convey our conviction of the character of the state

towards which the world is moving’. This ‘state’ is, of course, his World State or the

political ‘federation of all humanity’. He ventures ‘to prophesy that the next chapters

[of history] to be written will tell, though perhaps with long interludes of setback and

disaster, of the final world-wide political and social unity’. His history ends with what

is, as Wagar points out, one of Wells’s favourite utopian images: ‘[l]ife . . . will

presently stand upon the earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the

stars’.72 The last chapter of the Short History, entitled ‘The Political and Social

Reconstruction of the World’, concludes on a similarly utopian note of hope: ‘[w]hat

man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all the history we have told,

form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do’.73

There is a tension in Wells’s teleological scheme of history that arises from his firm

belief that biological evolution is not teleological. Critics such as Wagar, Williamson

and Reed have long since dispelled the once-popular image of Wells as a naïve

champion of what Wagar calls ‘the nineteenth-century dream of inevitable

progress’.74 Rather, they explain that throughout his life Wells thought of ‘progress’

principally in the terms of evolutionary biology, in which biological ‘progress’ is

counterbalanced by the inverse possibility of biological retrogression and extinction.

They argue emphatically that he did not hold the view, often associated with Herbert

Spencer, that the process of evolution is one of automatic progress.75 Indeed, incensed

at having been accused ‘of believing in Herbert Spencer’s inevitable progress’, he

wrote in a letter of 1939 to the editor of British Weekly:

72 Wells, Outline, 604, 605, 608; Wagar, World State, 59. 73 Wells, Short History, 405. 74 Wagar, World State, 81. 75 Wagar, World State, 80-7; Williamson, Critic, 23-30; Reed, Natural History, 95-109.

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[w]hat have my books been from The Time Machine to World Brain (and my Fate of Homo Sapiens now in the press) but the clearest insistence on the insecurity of progress and the possibility of human degeneration and extinction?76

While he continued to think of ‘progress’ in the same terms, he changed from his

early position of cosmic pessimism to later being a ‘prophet of progress’.77

Indeed, the universal histories are a central display of Wells as champion of progress.

We saw above that the Discovery of the Future negotiated a fraught path between

cosmic pessimism and an affirmation of progress, in which Wells somewhat

inelegantly decided to privilege the latter. The universal histories form a much more

sophisticated articulation of a similar position. They tell the story of the evolution of

humankind as one of progress without resorting to a Spencerian view of biological

evolution as one of inevitable progress. Wells managed to achieve this feat by

employing two principal historiographical models to structure his deep histories:

Biblical history and Immanuel Kant’s conception for a universal history with a

cosmopolitan aim.

Judeo-Christian Biblical history provides one model for Wells’s histories. In Meaning

in History (1949), Karl Löwith has argued that modern ‘philosophy of history’, which

he defines as ‘a systematic interpretation of universal history in accordance with a

principle by which historical events and successions are unified and directed towards

an ultimate meaning’, is entirely dependent on ‘the theological concept of history as a

history of fulfilment and salvation’. His central thesis is that modern philosophy of

76 H. G. Wells, letter to the Editor of British Weekly, 26 June 1939, in The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, ed. David C. Smith and Patrick Parrinder, iv (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), 227. 77 Williamson, Critic, 121.

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history ‘originates with the Hebrew and Christian Faith in a fulfilment and that it ends

with the secularization of its eschatological pattern’.78

Wells’s universal histories are paradigmatic instances of what Löwith calls

‘philosophies of history’. Moreover, they support his thesis that modern philosophy of

history involves the secularization of the eschatological pattern of theological

conceptions of history. In Wells’s case, he openly acknowledges that he takes

theological history as a model, and that he adapts it for secular purposes. His histories

are not theological but secular. The Outline holds that ‘[i]t is not the place of the

historian to discuss the truth and falsity of religion, but it is his business to record the

appearance of great constructive ideas’.79 It displays an interest in world religions

only insofar as they are phenomena which have brought about social and political

unity, a treatment for which Wells was criticized by Hilaire Belloc, amongst others.80

Nevertheless, Wells’s histories are consciously structured on the model of Biblical

history, as Wells makes clear in The Salvaging of Civilization (1921). Therein, he

advocates the creation of a ‘Bible of Civilization’ which would follow the precedent

of the ‘old Bible’ in many respects:

the opening books of our Bible of Civilization, our Bible translated into terms of modern knowledge . . . shall follow the old Bible precedent exactly. We shall tell . . . the New Story of Genesis, the tremendous spectacle of the Universe that science has opened to us, the flaming beginnings of our world, the vast ages of its making and the astounding unfolding, age after age, of Life.81

78 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 1, 2. 79 Wells, Outline, 146. 80 See, for example, Hilaire Belloc, A Companion to Mr. Wells’s ‘Outline of History’ (London: Sheed and Ward, 1926). William T. Ross provides a summary of the controversy between Wells and Belloc in H. G. Wells’s World Reborn: ‘The Outline of History’ and its Companions (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2002), 41. In his review of the Outline, E. M. Forster regretted that Wells made of Christ and Buddha ‘mere spiritual and social revolutionaries’ (‘A Great History, II’, Athenaeum, 4706 (9 July 1920), 42-3, 43). 81 Wells, Salvaging, 105-6.

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This new and scientific history, which would develop into ‘a universal history of

man’, is to retain the teleological structure of its Biblical precedent: ‘[i]t will still

point our lives to a common future which will be the reward and judgment of our

present lives’.82 Löwith points out that, for both theology and philosophy of history,

the ‘formal structure of the meaning of history’ derives from some ‘transcendent

purpose’ which is at the same time the goal or telos of history: ‘[t]he claim that

history has an ultimate meaning implies a final purpose or goal transcending the

actual events’.83 Wells’s claim that his universal history will point to a ‘common

future’ that will be both ‘the reward and judgment of our present lives’ shows that he

self-consciously draws on a teleological Biblical scheme of history. For him, the

‘common future’ is not the eschaton, but rather the coming World State, which stands

as the ultimate purpose and goal of history, and provides its ultimate meaning.

Biblical history provides Wells with a historiographic model that complements his

‘futurological’ turn. Löwith notes that the teleological structure of Judeo-Christian

history involves a future-directed attitude: ‘the temporal horizon for a final goal’ is

‘an eschatological future’, and thus the ‘ultimate meaning of a transcendent purpose is

focused in an expected future’. He points out that ‘[s]uch an expectation was most

intensely alive among the Hebrew prophets’, but also that ‘[t]he Christian and post-

Christian outlook on history is futuristic, perverting the classical meaning of historein,

which is related to present and past events’.84 In his histories, Wells pays tribute to the

Old Testament prophets, who are portrayed as having a mission very similar to his

own. The Short History celebrates the ‘new kind of man’, the Prophet, who came into

82 Wells, Salvaging, 106-7. 83 Löwith, Meaning, 4-5. 84 Löwith, Meaning, 6.

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existence with the Hebrew people, and Wells remarks that ‘[i]n the great utterances of

Isaiah the prophetic voice rises to a pitch of splendid anticipation and foreshadows the

whole earth united and at peace under one God’.85 More generally, Wells’s histories

are, like eschatological history, future-directed: they continually look forward to the

construction of the coming cosmopolitan society. As one early reviewer astutely

observed, the Outline is ‘the work of a man whose chief interest lies in the future’.86

Wells’s attitude towards the past in his histories is like that of ‘the Hebrew and

Christian view of history’ in which, as Löwith observes, ‘the past is a promise to the

future; consequently, the interpretation of the past becomes a prophecy in reverse,

demonstrating the past as a meaningful “preparation” for the future’.87 In Wells’s

case, even the prehuman geological past becomes what Löwith calls ‘a promise to the

future’. As we shall see, this promise is made in part through the typological structure

of the histories.

Wells’s histories adapt a typological structure from the Christian Bible. Erich

Auerbach gives an account of figura and figural interpretation, which sustain ‘the

figural view of history’ that ‘for almost a thousand years remained the only accepted

view of history’.88 Figural interpretation, as he puts it, ‘establishes a connection

between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the

second, while the second encompasses or fulfils the first. The two poles of the figure

are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the

85 Wells, Short History, 120-1. On the prophetic aspect of Wells’s futurology, and on his self-stylization as an Old-Testament prophet, see Parrinder, Shadows, 18-33. 86 Edward Shanks, ‘The Work of Mr. H. G. Wells’, London Mercury, 5/29 (March 1922), 506-18, 516. 87 Löwith, Meaning, 6. 88 Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11-76, 60, 53.

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stream of historical life’.89 Typically, ‘figures’ are events or persons in the Old

Testament that come to fulfilment in the New Testament with the Incarnation, or

remain in anticipation of fulfilment with the Second Coming. Figural interpretation is,

as Auerbach makes clear, integral to the Christian ‘teleological view of history and

the providential order of the world’.90

Wells adapted a figural structure for his secular universal histories. The prehuman and

the human past are to be fulfilled by a future World State. For instance, in the

Cainozoic period of the Short History, we ‘find a number of mammalian species

displaying the beginnings of a true social life and keeping together in herds, packs and

flocks’. Wells holds that the ‘new communication and interdependence of individuals’

in this period ‘foreshadows the development of human societies of which we shall

soon be telling’.91 It further implicitly foreshadows his own desired form of global

community. He encourages a similar figural interpretation of the human past. Forms

of human society, particularly those based either on world religions or on empires, are

portrayed as foreshadowing a lasting peace and unity. For example, in the Outline

Alexander the Great is held to be a ‘portent of world unity’, while his empire is

described as ‘the first revelation to the human imagination of the oneness of human

affairs’.92 Here, ‘revelation’ retains a religious connotation. Alexander’s empire is the

first historical revelation of the ‘oneness of human affairs’, though the full revelation

awaits the coming World State which, like the last days of the Book of Revelation,

promises to be a revelation of history’s meaning. Alexander’s empire is thus a figure

that attains its full meaning in history through the promised manifestation of a World

89 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 53. 90 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 56. 91 Wells, Short History, 38, 40. 92 Wells, Outline, 196.

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Federation. The figural structure of Wells’s secular universal histories is integral to

his teleological scheme of history as that of ‘the steadfast upward struggle of life

towards vision and control’.

A second historiographical model for Wells’s histories is that of Immanuel Kant’s

‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’ (1784). In the introduction to

the Outline, Wells claims that Kant’s is one of ‘the views of history that [the] Outline

seeks to realize’. Moreover, ‘there can be no common peace and prosperity without

common historical ideas. . . . This truth, which was apparent to that great philosopher

Kant a century or more ago . . . is now plain to the man in the street’.93 One way in

which Wells would have encountered Kant’s ideas on history is through F. S.

Marvin’s The Living Past: A Sketch of Western Progress (1913); he praises this

universal history in the introduction to the Outline as an ‘admirable summary of

human progress’.94

Marvin provides summaries of Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a

Cosmopolitan Aim’ (1784) and his ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795).

The former he describes as ‘incomparably the most powerful and pregnant statement

of the views [of progress] which we are discussing, before the nineteenth century

made them a commonplace’.95 In his preface, Marvin acknowledges his debt to Kant

93 Wells, Outline, vi, v. Wells refers to Kant’s ‘tract upon universal peace’, which seems to indicate Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795). However, as Ross points out, it is clearly Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’ (1784) that Wells has in mind (World Reborn, 37). Costello has suggested parallels between Wells’s Outline and Kant’s ‘Universal History’, pointing out that both share the hope for a future cosmopolitan society (World Historians, 35-6). 94 Wells, Outline, vi. 95 Marvin, Living Past, 221-2. Marvin referred his readers to W. Hastie’s collection of Kant’s essays, Principles of Politics (1891), pointing out that the ‘works on Universal History, Perpetual Peace, and the Principle of Progress’ are ‘of high importance’ (281). Here, I will refer to Kant in this edition.

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for providing the model for his progressive scheme of Western history, which tells the

story of the ‘growth of a common humanity’. The idea of progress, he writes,

first came clearly into view with Kant and the philosophers of the eighteenth century. Take Kant's theory of universal history as the growth of a world- community, reconciling the freedom of individuals and of individual states with the accomplishment of a common aim for mankind as a whole. Add to this the rising power of science as a collective and binding force which the century since Kant has made supreme. You have then one strong clear clue which . . . seems to offer in the field of history something of the guidance and system which Newtonian gravitation gave to celestial mechanics in the seventeenth century.96

Kant’s idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan aim, possibly mediated by

Marvin’s more recent adaptation of that scheme, provided Wells with a

historiographical model for his deep histories.

Kant held that it was not known whether nature has an aim or telos, as ‘we are too

short sighted to see through the secret mechanism of her constitution’. Therefore, it

‘seems, at first sight, a strange and even an absurd proposal to suggest the

composition of a History according’ to a teleological conception of nature: ‘[i]t may

well appear that only a Romance could be produced from such a point of view’.

Nevertheless, he proposes that we should assume that history has an aim, primarily

for pragmatic reasons: ‘this idea may be serviceable’, and ought to serve ‘as a clue to

enable us to penetrate the otherwise planless Aggregate of human actions’.97 The

‘Ninth Proposition’ of the ‘Universal History’ holds that:

[a] philosophical attempt to work out the Universal History of the world according to the plan of Nature in its aiming at a perfect Civil Union, must be

96 Marvin, Living Past, vi. 97 Kant, ‘Universal History’, 25; his emphasis. Wells’s invitation for his readers to approach his histories like novels, and the consequent blurring of history and fiction, can be read in light of Kant’s project, and his suggestion that a history with a cosmopolitan aim might be thought to produce a ‘Romance’.

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regarded as possible, and as even capable of helping forward the purpose of nature.98

Of course, Wells writes after Darwin, from whom he drew the conclusion that nature

does not have an aim or purpose. However, he adopts Kant’s proposal of a

cosmopolitan aim, using this end-goal as a ‘clue’ throughout his history for pragmatic

reasons: its very idea promotes the actualization of such an end. Kant’s telos of a

‘perfect Civil Union’ thereby stands as a model for Wells’s World State.

Kant’s secular universal history is structurally similar to Biblical history in being

teleological. History for both derives its meaning in part from a future end state,

whether this be the eschaton, or a secular cosmopolitan society. Kant draws attention

to this structural similarity when he describes his history as ‘chiliastic’: we see ‘that

philosophy may also have its millennial view, but in this case, the Chiliasm is of such

a nature that the very idea of it . . . may help to further its realisation’.99

Wells followed Kant in adopting a teleological scheme of history. In The Future in

America (1906), he records how ‘[l]ike most people of my generation, I was launched

into life with millennial assumptions’, and believed that the future would bring

‘trumpets and shoutings and celestial phenomena, a battle of Armageddon, and the

Judgment’. However, as a student of biology, these millennial assumptions were

replaced by ‘a blackness and a vagueness about the endless vista of years ahead, that

was tremendous—that terrified’.100 (This terrifying view of the endless vista of years

corresponds to the sublime geological time of The Time Machine.) The histories

98 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitical Point of View’, in Kant’s Principles of Politics, Including his Essay on Perpetual Peace: A Contribution to Political Science, ed. and trans. W. Hastie (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1891), 2-29, 25. 99 Kant, ‘Universal History’, 21. 100 H. G. Wells, The Future in America: A Search After Realities (London: George Bell & Sons, 1906), 9, 10.

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return to a form of millennialism, although not the ‘strictly protestant’ version of his

childhood, but a more sophisticated secular version, in the mold of Kant’s ‘chialistic’

philosophy of history.101

Geological Time and Narrative

The narrative form of Wells’s universal histories contrasts markedly with that of his

earlier scientific romance, The Time Machine. Whereas The Time Machine is a

fragmentary narrative, the universal histories have a continuous narrative form, a fact

that Wells made clear in the very first line of the Outline: ‘[t]his Outline of History is

an attempt to tell, truly and clearly, in one continuous narrative, the whole story of

life and mankind so far as it is known today’.102 This attempt to tell the story of life as

a continuous narrative poses certain formal and technical difficulties, particularly as

regards the prehuman past. Certainly, the use of Biblical history and Kant’s universal

history as historiographic models provided Wells with a shape and structure to his

history, and suggested a broad narrative organization which could be imposed over

the expanses of deep history. Nevertheless, he still faced two difficulties in telling the

story of the earth’s geological past, which were also problems faced by geologists

with their deep historical narratives. The first is that of trying to construct a

continuous narrative of the earth’s past when, due to the imperfection of the

geological record, there are large gaps in the knowledge of that past. The second is

that of telling a story which spans a vast amount of time, without making that story

appear more event-filled than it in fact was. I will address these two difficulties in

101 Wells, America, 9. 102 Wells, Outline, v, my emphasis.

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turn, contrasting Wells’s narrative response in the histories with the fragmentary

narrative of The Time Machine.

The imperfection of the geological record poses difficulties for the attempt to tell the

story of the earth’s past as a continuous narrative. In both universal histories, Wells

clearly foregrounds the imperfect nature of the geological record, and our

consequently partial knowledge of the earth’s remote past. In the Outline, he employs

a variant of the common metaphor of the legibility of the geological record, and

extends his conceit that rocks are ‘historical documents’ by holding that these rocks

are not like the orderly books and pages of a library. Rather, they are ‘torn, disrupted,

interrupted, flung about, defaced, like a carelessly arranged office after it has

experienced in succession a bombardment, a hostile military occupation, looting, an

earthquake, riots, and a fire’.103 He later returns to this metaphor, stressing the

incompleteness of our knowledge of the geological past:

[t]he Record of the Rocks is like a great book that has been carelessly misused. All its pages are torn, worn and defaced, and many are altogether missing. The outline of the story that we sketch here has been pieced together slowly and painfully in an investigation that is still incomplete and still in progress.104

However, while he deploys a metaphor of the geological record as a book with torn

and missing pages, the narrative that he tells about the earth’s past is itself continuous.

Wells is happy to draw attention to our lack of knowledge of the past, but this lack

does not disrupt the continuity of his story. For example, at the end of the seventh

chapter of the Short History, he points to a gap in our knowledge of perhaps ‘several

million years’ that is due to a break in the geological record: 103 Wells, Outline, 7. In the Short History, Wells offers a similar conceit: he compares the sedimentary rocks to ‘the leaves of a library that has been repeatedly looted and burnt’ (10). 104 Wells, Outline, 14.

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[t]here comes a break in the Record of the Rocks that may represent several million years. There is a veil here still, over even the outline of the history of life. When it lifts again, the Age of Reptiles is at an end . . . we find now a new scene, a new and hardier flora, and a new and hardier fauna in possession of the world.105

This break in the geological record is even reflected typographically on the page, with

the use of ellipses at the end of the previous paragraph, and the atypical use of a line

break between paragraphs. However, the gap in our knowledge of the past does not

otherwise disrupt the continuity of the story. Indeed, within the same paragraph, he

moves on to the next ‘scene’ of history. Narrative continuity is here facilitated by the

ambiguity that attaches to the word ‘scene’, which refers both to a geological period

and to a narrative scene. This second meaning is reinforced by the fact that this

‘scene’ forms the topic of the next chapter, which covers the Cainozoic period. The

transition between narrative scenes and chapters in the story invites the reader to

make a similarly smooth imaginative transition between geological epochs. In this

sense, the metaphor of a ‘veil’ is telling: it suggests that a period of geological history

is unclear or obscured from view, but further intimates that this break is being

concealed or hidden. Wells becomes like a magician using a narrative trick to rush his

readers past an inconvenient break in history, triumphantly lifting the veil to reveal a

new scene.

The narrative continuity of the universal histories contrasts with the fragmentary

narrative of The Time Machine, which, as we saw above, reflects the fragmentary

nature of the geological record and of our knowledge of the earth’s past.

Correlatively, rather than dwelling on the poverty of our knowledge of the past, as the

frame narrator of The Time Machine was made painfully aware of his ‘vast ignorance’

105 Wells, Short History, 35.

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of the future, Wells offers his Short History to his reader as an aid to ‘refresh and

repair his faded or fragmentary conceptions of the great adventure of mankind’.106

The attempt to present the geological past in the form of a narrative also threatens to

make that past appear more eventful than it actually was. The challenge is how to

achieve an appropriate rhythm in a narrative which spans a vast period of time. In the

Principles of Geology (1830-3), Charles Lyell raised a similar technical problem. To

illustrate the errors of the catastrophists which arise from assuming too short a time-

scale in which the geological events of the past are supposed to have occurred, he

asks us to imagine that:

the annals of the civil and military transactions of a great nation . . . be perused under the impression that they occurred in a period of one hundred instead of two thousand years. Such a portion of history would immediately assume the air of a romance; the events would seem devoid of credibility, and inconsistent with the present course of human affairs. A crowd of incidents would follow each other in thick succession. Armies and fleets would appear to be assembled only to be destroyed, and cities built merely to fall in ruins.107

By compressing a two-thousand year history into a one-hundred year time-scale, a

narrative account would read like an event-crowded romance, rather than a history.

Olaf Stapledon’s novel Last and First Men (1930), the plot of which turns on a

markedly Wellsian conception of history, raises a closely analogous problem in

explicitly narrative terms. The novel’s principal narrator is a historian from the distant

future who tells the story of humankind in a (fictional) deep history of the universe. In

the introduction, the narrator, who lives ‘aeons’ in the distant future, invites the reader

to

106 Wells, Short History, v. 107 Lyell, Principles, i, 29.

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contemplate for a few moments the mere magnitudes of cosmical events. For, compressed as it must necessarily be, the narrative that I have to tell may seem to present a sequence of adventures and disasters crowded together . . . in fact, man’s career has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling from rock to rock, than a great sluggish river, broken seldom by rapids. . . . [E]ven [the] few seemingly rapid events themselves were in fact often long-drawn-out and tedious. They acquire a mere illusion of speed from the speed of the narrative.108

The narrative compression in which ‘adventures and disasters’ appear ‘crowded

together’ is much like that of Lyell’s imagined compressed history, in which a ‘crowd

of incidents would follow each other in thick succession’. The ‘illusion of speed’

which Stapledon’s narrator diagnoses as arising from ‘the speed of the narrative’ can

be glossed through the narratological distinction between story time and discourse

time. If vast stretches of story time are narrated in brief stretches of discourse time,

the story appears to be more eventful than it actually was.

In part, Wells’s histories negotiate the formal difficulty that Stapledon’s narrator

diagnoses by telling the story of the prehuman past as one which is supposedly devoid

of events. While its introduction stresses that the Outline is ‘one continuous

narrative’, Wells also claims in the early chapters to be ‘telling . . . a history without

events’. The first ‘event’ does not occur until the eleventh chapter, entitled ‘Neolithic

Man’. This ‘event of primary importance’ is ‘the breaking in of the Atlantic waters to

the great Mediterranean valley’. It is narrated with the intensity and drama of an

adventure story: ‘[s]uddenly the ocean waters began to break through over the

westward hills and to pour in upon [the] primitive people’. Before this point, the

narrative lacks events, and is what is called ‘a history of ages and periods and stages

in development’.109 As we shall see, Wells employs a variety of strategies to maintain

108 W. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (London: Methuen, 1930), 2, emphasis removed. 109 Wells, Outline, 59-60.

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a narrative thread through a prehuman past that is devoid of events: he sketches a

series of static scenes conjoined by drastic summary and ellipsis, he uses an

imaginative conceit of time travel, and he employs rising action and anti-climax to

achieve a novelistic rhythm.

To tell the story of the remote past, Wells’s narrative proceeds by sketching a series

of static, eventless scenes. Martin Rudwick and Ralph O’Connor have drawn attention

to the importance of the tradition of pictorial representation of the primaeval world for

the imagination of deep time.110 Wells’s histories contain many such ‘scenes from

deep time’, which help the reader to visualize the successive geological ages being

described. For example, the Short History contains pictures with titles such as

‘Landscape Before Life’, ‘Marine Life in the Cambrian Period’, ‘Sharks and Ganoids

of the Devonian Period’, and ‘A Carboniferous Swamp’.111 In a footnote to the

Outline, Wells also recommends other works which provide vivid illustrations of the

geological past, such as Knipe’s versified Nebula to Man (1905) and his Evolution in

the Past (1912), which are ‘full of admirable illustrations of extinct monsters’; he also

warns his readers of the historical inaccuracy of the ‘fantastic pictures’ of E. T.

Reed’s Prehistoric Peeps (1894).112

Functioning in a manner similar to the accompanying pictures, the narrative of the

early chapters of the histories unfolds as a series of static verbal sketches of different

geological ages. In his review of the Outline, E. M. Forster captured this narrative

quality well when he compared Wells’s history to a lecture which is given with the

110 Martin Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1992); O’Connor, Earth, 263-324. 111 Wells, Short History, 9, 11, 18, 21. 112 Wells, Outline, 24.

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aid of slides that are projected onto a sheet with the help of a lantern.113 In the Short

History, a metaphor of sketching pictures encourages us to think of the narrative in a

visual way: ‘[i]n a few paragraphs a picture of the lush vegetation and swarming

reptiles of that first great summer of life, the Mesozoic period, has been sketched’.

Such sketches become the basic narrative unit in Wells’s story of the prehuman past;

they are often connected together by means of striking narrative ellipses, through

which huge portions of story time are elided: ‘[t]he Earth aged. One million years

followed another’.114 By advancing a series of static verbal sketches connected by

such ellipses, Wells tells the story of the geological past without recourse to any

events; the rhythm of his histories consists in the movement between such scenes.

Another strategy that is deployed in the Short History to tell the story of the deep past

is the imaginative conceit of time travel. In The Time Machine, the device of time

travel results in the bifurcation of story time into two time frames. The first is the time

frame of the Traveller’s journey, which lasts a week, and the second is the time frame

across which he travels, which is over sixty millions years. This device allows the

Traveller to witness extremely slow geological and astronomical changes, which

would otherwise never have been observable during a single lifetime. The second

chapter of the Short History, entitled ‘The World in Time’, deploys a similar

imaginative conceit:

[i]f we could go back through that infinitude of time and see the earth in this earlier stage of its history, we should behold a scene more like the interior of a blast furnace.115

The journey back is not a literal one with the aid of a time machine, but an

imaginative one, expressed by the hypothetical clause: ‘[i]f we could go back . . . we 113 E. M. Forster, ‘A Great History’, Athenaeum, 4705 (2 July 1920), 8, 8. 114 Wells, Short History, 30, 9. 115 Wells, Short History, 5.

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should behold a scene’. The history proceeds to imagine a voyage through time in a

passage which, other than being written in the subjunctive mood, is almost

indistinguishable from the Traveller’s descriptions of his voyages through time:

[a]cross a sky of fiery clouds the glare of the hurrying sun and moon would sweep swiftly like hot breaths of flame. . . . Slowly by degrees as one million . . . years followed another, this fiery scene would lose its eruptive incandescence. . . . The sun and moon growing now each more distant and each smaller, would rush with diminishing swiftness across the heavens.116

Through this imaginative conceit, vast stretches of story time, and the normally

imperceptible changes which occur therein, are covered in an extremely short

discourse time. As in The Time Machine, the conceit of time travel allows a visual

way of imagining the earth’s changes through deep time.

Despite being devoid of events, the early chapters of Wells’s histories take on a

familiar novelistic rhythm, complete with rising action and anti-climax. As we have

seen, the preface to the Short History encourages its readers to read the work

‘straight-forwardly almost as a novel is read’. A similar approach to the Outline was

encouraged by its marketing campaign, and the advertisements which portrayed Wells

as a ‘Master Story-Teller’ and his history as ‘Thrilling as Romance’.117 Indeed, both

histories display many features associated with novelistic narratives. For example, the

break in the geological record at the end of the Mesozoic period discussed above, far

from resulting in a fragmentary narrative, is made to form part of the novelistic

rhythm of the history. We learn that ‘the Mesozoic period rose to its climax’, a

‘climax’ which refers most immediately to the climax of a geological epoch, but also

suggests that there will be a narrative climax. However, expectation of a narrative

116 Wells, Short History, 5, 6-8, my emphasis. 117 Arthur Lynch, ‘H. G. Wells as Historian: An Interview with the Famous Novelist Whose Latest Work is A UNIVERSAL HISTORY’, Strand Magazine, 58/347 (November 1919), 464-8, 468; see Skelton, ‘Paratext’, 247, 271.

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climax is disappointed, and we never find out what happened: ‘[t]here comes a break

in the Record of the Rocks that may represent several million years’.118 The parallel

episode in the Outline is marked by a similar cadence of rising action and anti-

climax:‘[t]his great period of Mesozoic life, this second volume of the book of life, is

indeed an amazing story of reptilian life proliferating and developing. But the most

striking thing of all the story remains to be told’. However, the promise of a ‘striking’

event in the story proves to be a false one, and we learn anti-climactically that: ‘[t]hen

the record is broken. . . . When next we find abundant traces of the land plants and the

land animals of the earth, this great multitude of reptile species had gone’. What must

have been an ‘abrupt ending’, a ‘striking revolution’, and a ‘catastrophic alteration’ is

speculated about only retrospectively, and fails to constitute a narrative event, a

failure which only serves to highlight the absence of events from the early chapters of

the history.119

The contrasting narrative forms of The Time Machine and the histories contribute to

their very different articulations of deep time. Both Frank Kermode and Paul Ricoeur

claim that narrative humanizes time. Kermode characterizes plot as ‘an organization

that humanizes time by giving it form’, and Ricoeur argues that ‘time becomes human

time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative’.120 Conversely,

through its resistance to narrative organization, the geological time of The Time

Machine remains inhuman. It forms part of a universe which is eminently inhospitable

to humanity. In Ricoeur’s terms, The Time Machine’s fragmentary narrative does not

allow a bridge between phenomenological and cosmological forms of time, or

between lived time and the time of nature, but rather emphasizes their stark 118 Wells, Short History, 27, 35. 119 Wells, Outline, 22-3. 120 Kermode, Ending, 45; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 3.

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disjunction. Wells’s romance does not allow a poetic resolution to humanity’s

position against the abyssal perspectives of geological time that had been discovered

by Hutton and Lyell, but rather emphasises humanity’s insignificant and precarious

position within a hostile universe, encapsulated by its closing image of the Traveller

lost somewhere in the vast expanses of time.

Further, the fragmentary narrative form of the romance contributes to the sublimity of

the deep time depicted therein. ‘Obscurity’ has long played an important role in

conceptualizations of the sublime. For example, in his Philosophical Enquiry in the

Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Edmund Burke held that

‘terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of

the sublime’, and that ‘[t]o make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to

be necessary’.121 As we have seen, the loss of the Traveller’s second story makes the

romance fragmentary, and leaves the deep future ‘black and blank’ to the frame-

narrator.122 This image of the deep future as ‘black’—which in turn echoes metaphors

in geological discourse of the geological past as black and blank—is one of obscurity,

which in Burke’s terms makes it ‘very terrible’. It thereby feeds back into the

sublimity of the deep time of the romance.

By contrast, the narrative organization of Wells’s deep histories humanizes geological

time. Through the familiar rhythms of novelistic narrative, geological time is

humanized, and the remote past is recuperated to play its role as the background to the

adventure of humankind. The deep past is no longer portrayed as a terrifying non-

human other, but forms part of Wells’s newly-humanized universe. 121 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 2nd edn (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), 97, 99. 122 Wells, Time Machine, 91.

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Along with the humanization of deep time in the histories, the sublime aesthetic is

abandoned. Both the past and foreseen future are immense, but they are no longer

sources of sublime terror. For example, in the Short History, Wells writes that:

[t]he Age of Reptiles lasted, it is now guessed, eighty million years. Had any quasi-human intelligence been watching the world through that inconceivable length of time, how safe and eternal the sunshine and abundance must have seemed, how assured the wallowing prosperity of the Dinosaurs and the flapping abundance of the flying lizards!123

This safe land of eternal sunshine is a far cry from the hostile future world the

Traveller visits, or the frame-narrator’s speculations about his fate in the deep past

among the ‘blood-drinking, hairy savages’, or among the ‘grotesque saurians, the

huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times’.124 Geological processes are similarly

unthreatening. For example, in a late edition of the Outline, despite involving

‘colossal stresses’ and happening through ‘many millions of years’, the ‘wandering of

the continents about the surface of the earth’ is tamed through an extremely domestic

simile: ‘the mantle turns over in a pattern of gigantic vertical eddies, much as the

water in the warmed saucepan turns over’.125 If we find vestiges of the sublime

aesthetic in the histories’ portrayal of deep time, it functions not to highlight

humanity’s insignificant position in a hostile universe, but rather to augment the

wonder of humanity’s progress through deep history towards a cosmopolitan society:

‘[a]ge by age through gulfs of time at which imagination reels, life has been growing

from a mere stirring in the intertidal slime towards freedom, power, and

consciousness’.126

123 Wells, Short History, 33. 124 Wells, Time Machine, 91. 125 H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (London: Cassell, 1972), 23. 126 Wells, Short History, 15.

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The humanization of deep time in Wells’s histories supports his political aims. As

part of his account of the humanization of time by plot, Kermode argues that through

narrative organization, and in particular through the imposition of a narrative ending,

‘that which was conceived of as simply successive becomes charged with past and

future: what was chronos becomes kairos’.127 As we have seen, Wells took Biblical

history as one of the models for his teleological histories, and adapted a figural

scheme of interpretation. According to Kermode’s narrative theory, this imposition of

an end-governed narrative scheme on his histories brings about a humanization of

time, in which geological time is no longer conceived of as a homogenous series of

instants, but becomes charged with the past and future. It is not simply the case that

phenomena such as the communal organisation of mammals in the Cainozoic period

foreshadow the end of history in a figural manner, but rather that the time at which

those phenomena occurred becomes charged with the future. In Kermode’s terms,

Wells’s geological time is transformed from being the empty time of mere succession

(chronos) to being a kairological time, composed of moments shot through with

political opportunity. Geological time and the geological past are brought within the

sphere of the political, and bear directly on Wells’s aim of establishing a World State.

The political aspect of Wells’s humanization of geological time can equally be

articulated in the terms of Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, and of narrative repetition. In

these terms, the narrative structure of Wells’s histories allows a poetic resolution

between phenomenological and cosmological forms of time. Through the continuous

narrative of the deep histories, lived time is re-inscribed on geological time in the

form of historical time. This human historical time raises the possibility of a repetition

127 Kermode, Ending, 46.

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of communal modes of being from the prehuman past, a possibility that stands to be

realized through the political formation of Wells’s desired World Federation.

Deep Time, Transnationalism and the Politics of Progress

Deep time is integral to the transnational politics of Wells’s histories. It directly

supports his political aims of unsettling nationalist sentiment and facilitating a

transnational World State, thereby ensuring world peace.128 The penultimate chapter

of the Outline blames ‘the catastrophe of 1914’ on nationalism and the aggressive

imperialism which is portrayed as an extension of such nationalism. ‘[M]odern

imperialism’, writes Wells, ‘is essentially a megalomaniac nationalism, a nationalism

made aggressive’.129 The teaching of national and nationalistic forms of history is

held partially responsible for such a megalomaniac nationalism. For instance, Wells

attributes the rise of bellicose German nationalism in part to ‘German historical

teaching’, which ‘became an immense systematic falsification of the human past’.130

Even more emphatically, in the ‘Poison Called History’ (1939), he claimed that

‘[n]ationalism is the purest artificiality, and is made by the teaching of history and by

nothing else’.131

By contrast, Wells’s world history employs deep time to challenge the hegemony of

the nation state as a sovereign political entity. The ideas of nation and empire were

uncritically accepted, suggests Wells, because people lacked ‘the sweeping views that

128 These aims are also those of his sustained campaign to promote the teaching of world history, of which Partington provides a succinct summary: ‘the old bias in favour of nationalist history which led to war and degeneration, had to be replaced by a bias for cosmopolitan history that would lead to world federation and peace’ (Cosmopolis, 89). 129 Wells, Outline, 560-1, his emphasis. 130 Wells, Outline, 551. 131 Wells, ‘Poison’, 93.

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a scientific study of history can give’. By contrast, his own history provides such a

‘sweeping’ perspective through its great vistas of geological time. ‘If our story of the

world has demonstrated anything’, he writes, ‘it has demonstrated the mingling of

races and peoples, the instability of human divisions, the swirling variety of human

groups and human ideas of association’.132 By placing the modern nation state—

which only emerged in the nineteenth century—in the wider perspective of deep

history, it is shown to be a comparatively recent phenomenon. Moreover, it is one that

is subject to change and supersession by other forms of political association.133

Indeed, while Huxley had employed perspectives on geological time to unsettle the

view that human nature is somehow permanent, Wells here employs a similar

perspective to challenge the view that ideas of nation and empire represent something

‘fundamental and inalterable in human nature’.134

In addition to challenging the nation, Wells’s histories provide a scheme of deep

history capable of supporting a transnational political community. By demonstrating

the unity of humanity as a species with a common origin in the remote geological

past, the Outline, as advertised in its introduction, provides ‘common historical ideas’

that promise to hold people together ‘in harmonious co-operation’, and thereby avoid

the otherwise inevitable ‘drift towards conflict and destruction’.135 By furnishing

readers with a sense of deep world history, Wells’s histories facilitate a new,

transnational form of political community, and thereby bring the promise of a lasting

world peace. However, in the final section of this chapter, I will turn a critical eye on

132 Wells, Outline, 528. 133 Wells, Outline, 528-9; see also 561. 134 Wells, Outline, 529-30. 135 Wells, Outline, v, emphasis removed. Similarly, in the ‘Poison Called History’, Wells argued that his preferred mode of history, with its long temporal perspectives, can unsettle typically ‘falsified account[s]’ of national origins, and replace them with an account of the biological origin of humanity in the ‘remote past’ (97, 103).

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Wells’s progressive scheme of history, suggesting that a more sinister politics lies

behind his enticing promises.

Like Wells, the historians of the Paris-based Annales school employed a form of

long-durational historical time to create a non-national form of history, which is in

turn capable of supporting a transnational politics. The Annalistes in general, and

Fernand Braudel in particular, pioneered a new approach to the study of history based

around the long time-span.136 The journal Annales d’historie economique et sociale,

whose foundation in 1929 by Marc Bloc and Lucien Febvre did much to establish the

Annales school, announced its concern to investigate long time-spans from its very

first issue.137 However, it is Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à

l’époque de Phillippe II (1949) which constitutes the best-known and most celebrated

example of long-durational history.138 In his conclusion, Braudel sums up how his

work ‘represents an attempt to write a new kind of history, total history, written in

three different registers, on three different levels, perhaps described as three different

conceptions of time’.139 The Mediterranean is structured around these ‘three different

conceptions of time’. The first part is based around the longue durée, a long-

durational time which was taken as a parameter of historical study from geography,

which in turn was influenced by geology and conceptions of geological time.140 The

second part is based around the medium time span or ‘conjuncture’, a measure

136 For a history of the Annales school, see Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-89 (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). 137 The inaugural issue of Annales announced that: ‘les recherches . . . sur les échanges de civilization, depuis la préhistorie jusqu’à des temps tout proches de nous, y puiseraient de précieux objets de méditation’ (Annales d’histoire economique et sociale, 1 (1929), 59). 138 All references here are to The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols (London: Collins, 1972-3), which is a translation of the second revised edition of La Méditerranée et le monde méditerannén à l'époque de Philippe II (Librairie Armand Collin, 1966). 139 Braudel, Mediterranean, ii, 1238. 140 Despite its similar name, Braudel’s longue durée has very little in common with Bergson’s durée.

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borrowed from economics and the social sciences. The third part is based around the

short time-span, and is a version of traditional history which focusses on individuals

and events. Braudel’s approach is, in effect, to ‘dissect history into various planes’, or

to ‘divide historical time into geographical time, social time, and individual time’.141

In his essay, ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée’ (1958), he

emphasized the ‘exceptional value of the long time span’ to the study of history: ‘it is

in relation to these expanses of slow-moving history that the whole of history is to be

rethought’.142

In Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson has drawn attention to the

power of Braudel’s historiography as a transnational form of history. He counterposes

narratives of nation that supposedly arise because the modern nation has ‘the need for

a narrative of “identity”’, with Braudel’s ‘awesome’ Mediterranean. In particular, he

contrasts the two forms of history by the way they approach the subject of death.

Whereas ‘national biography’ seizes on the ‘exemplary suicides, poignant

martyrdoms, assassinations, [and] executions’ of its members, Braudel moves

attention beyond the named individual and the historical event:

[f]or Braudel, the deaths that matter are those myriad anonymous events, which, aggregated and averaged into secular mortality rates, permit him to chart the slow-changing conditions of life for millions of anonymous human beings of whom the last question asked is their nationality.143

Braudel’s approach to history forms a rich alternative to national biography in part

through its violation of the traditional spatial and temporal parameters of national

history. It does not focus geographically on a single nation, but rather on the wider

141 Braudel, Mediterranean, i, 21. 142 Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée’, in On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 25-54, 27, 43. 143 Anderson, Communities, 205-6.

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area of the ‘Mediterranean’, and it does not limit itself to the time-scale of nations, but

instead addresses the wider temporal perspectives of the longue durée.

While both Wells and the Annalistes employ long time-spans to unsettle national

versions of history, their approach to history is otherwise markedly different. Whereas

Wells advanced universal histories, the Annalistes eschewed overarching schemes of

history, preferring instead to investigate medium and long-term historical processes

from social, economic and geographical perspectives. And while Wells embraced

narrative, boldly championing his grand historical narratives, the Annalistes spurned

historical narrative. (Consequently, Wells falls foul of what Jean-François Lyotard

has characterized as the postmodern incredulity towards grand narratives, while the

Annalistes do not.) For example, Braudel banished narrative from medium and long-

term history. As Ricoeur points out, Braudel took ‘narrative history’ and a ‘history of

events’ to be ‘almost synonymous expressions’, and, like the Annalistes more

generally, he took ‘it as given that the fate of narrative is sealed at the same time as

that of events’.144 The first two parts of the Mediterranean dispense with narrative,

and the historical event is dissolved into an investigation of social and economic

structures and conjunctures, and long-term geographical processes. By contrast, Wells

implicitly distinguished narrative history and a history of events, managing to

maintain the ‘continuous narrative’ of his universal histories throughout the remote

prehuman past by ‘telling . . . a history without events’. What results is two

contrasting forms of history that are capable of supporting equally different versions

of transnational politics. The difference between these politics is reflected in the

domain of literary studies.

144 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 101, 111.

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Braudel’s concept of longue durée has recently been embraced in literary studies. In

her influential Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time

(2006), Wai Chee Dimock has adapted Braudel’s longue durée to forge a

transnational approach to the study of literature. Noting ‘the glaring inadequacy of a

nation-based model in world politics’, she points to a ‘parallel inadequacy in literary

studies’. She appeals to Braudel’s longue durée to disrupt hermetically nation-based

approaches to the study of American literature, posing the question: ‘[w]hat would

American literature look like . . . restored to a longue durée, a scale enlargement

along the temporal axis that also enlarges its spatial compass?’145

Following Dimock, several critics have drawn on Braudel’s historiography and his

longue durée in their transnational approaches to literature, particularly in

combination with a geographic focus on the ‘Atlantic world’.146 Laura Doyle has

imported Braudel’s longue durée into modernist studies, highlighting its value for

global approaches to modernism, and arguing that we need to ‘lengthen our time lines

and revise our historiography of empire’.147 Such recent approaches contrast markedly

with Wells’s earlier transnational approach to literature. Dimock and others have

employed Braudel’s longue durée to disrupt national canons of literature by

expansion: where formerly-canonical texts are still read, they are brought into new

combinations with other texts from temporally or spatially remote locations. In an

145 Dimock, Continents, 2, 4. 146 See Susan Gillman, ‘Oceans of Longue Durées’, PMLA, 127/2 (March 2012), 328-34. 147 Laura Doyle, ‘Modernist Studies and Inter-Imperiality in the Longue Durée’, in Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 669-96, 672. Doyle’s appeal to Braudel’s longue durée forms part of the ‘new modernist studies’ which, as we shall see in the conclusion to this thesis, is a critical movement characterized by its transnational approaches and its attempt to expand the temporal and spatial boundaries of modernism.

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antithetically-opposed manner, Wells advocated a contraction of ‘world literature’

into a quintessential canon.

In the Salvaging of Civilization (1921), Wells called for the creation of a ‘Bible of

Civilization’, the first part of which would be a universal history similar to his Outline

of History, and another part of which would be an anthology of world literature. The

former would provide common historical ideas for its cosmopolitan citizens, while the

latter would provide a common literary and cultural background. Using the formation

of the Christian Bible as a model, he advocated the hyper-condensation of ‘the whole

world literature’—which might otherwise take up ‘twenty or thirty thousand

volumes’—into a ‘canonical Book or Books’.148 This ‘organized attempt to gather up

the quintessence of literature’ would involve a process of vigorous selection. For

example, only short excerpts or certain speeches from William Shakespeare—who

might otherwise have been an obvious contender—are to make it in to the canon. The

same is true of the novelists, and only excerpted passages from ‘the greater books of

such writers as Cervantes, Defoe, Dickens, Fielding, Tolstoi, Hardy, Hamsun’ stand a

chance of making the cut.149 When finished, he proposes that his Book or Books of

Literature, along with his ‘Book of World History’, would ‘go into the hands of every

man and woman in that coming great civilization which is the dream of our race’, and

would help ‘constitute the intellectual and moral cement of the World Society’.150

Such a proposal constitutes a transnational approach to literature. Wells’s Book of

Literature is to be composed of works drawn not from a national canon of literature,

but rather from ‘world literature’, and moreover is to help cement his readers together

as citizens of a transnational world state. 148 Wells, Salvaging, 118-9. 149 Wells, Salvaging, 131, 122-3. 150 Wells, Salvaging, 120.

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However, while transnational, Wells’s approach is arguably guilty of a form of

cultural imperialism. Given the heavily Eurocentric bias of the authors which he

considers for inclusion in his canon, we might be sceptical about his conception of

‘world literature’, and about his claim that such a literature would be ‘universally

inspiring’.151 As we shall see below, a homologous objection can be raised against his

universal histories: while they avoid a form of nationalist imperialism, their

progressive scheme of history is nevertheless guilty of a form of cosmopolitan neo-

imperialism.

While Wells’s promises of progress towards a harmonious world community and a

lasting world peace may sound attractive, I suggest that they ought to be subjected to

closer critical scrutiny. Is there a more sinister politics lurking behind these utopian

promises of progress? George Orwell famously thought so, as he made apparent in his

essay ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ (1941). In a series of writings from The

Road to Wigan Pier (1937) to his obituary of Wells in 1946, Orwell levelled a critique

of Wells’s views of progress, and of his vision of a World State. In The Road to

Wigan Pier, he dubbed Wells ‘the arch-priest of “progress”’, and suggested that ‘vast

contradictions’ arise in his work because he ‘cannot write with any conviction against

“progress”’.152 In his review of Wells’s Two Film Stories (1940), he drew attention to

Wells’s enormous influence, and suggested that ‘[t]he whole concept of “progress”

(meaning aeroplanes and steel-and-concrete buildings) . . . which is definitely a part

151 Wells, Salvaging, 124. The vast majority of the authors whom he considers for inclusion in his canon are European, and of those, most are English: he mentions William Shakespeare, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, P. B. Shelley, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy (122-4). More generally, Wells was, according to Partington, ‘a firm believer in Europe’s role as exporter of culture and civilisation’ (Cosmopolis, 111). 152 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 188.

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of the modern mind, owes an immense amount to him’. However, he argued that

Wells confused ‘mechanical progress with justice, liberty and common decency’.153

In ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, his most inflammatory essay, Orwell

diagnosed an antithesis which supposedly runs through all of Wells’s work: between

the ‘man of science who is working towards a planned World State’, and the

reactionary: ‘[o]n the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes,

steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion’. He goes on to

challenge Wells’s ‘equation of science with common sense’, and to argue that in fact

his scientific ideal is best realised in Nazi Germany:

[m]uch of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there.154

Orwell continued his critique in ‘The Re-discovery of Europe’ (1942). He aligned

Wells with Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, and contrasted this generation of

writers with a later one which included James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot,

Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley and Wyndham Lewis. What supposedly distinguished

these two generations is their attitude towards progress. Whereas the earlier

generation had championed the idea of progress, the later rejected such an idea:

‘[t]hey don’t any longer believe that progress happens or that it ought to happen’.155

To illustrate this distinction, he contrasts Wells with Lawrence, remarking that

Lawrence’s ‘abandonment of Science and Progress’ is, ‘[f]rom the point of H. G.

Wells’, ‘simply heresy and nonsense’. Though holding reservations about Lawrence

and the later generation of writers, all of whom are supposedly ‘politically

153 George Orwell, ‘Review of . . . Film Stories by H. G. Wells’ (1940), in The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), xii, 189-92, 191. 154 George Orwell, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ (1941), in Complete Works, xii, 536-41, 538-9. 155 George Orwell, ‘The Re-discovery of Europe’ (1942), in Complete Works, xiii, 209-21, 212.

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reactionary, or at best . . . uninterested in politics’, Orwell nevertheless celebrates

their ‘seeing through’ the notion of progress:

[p]artly that was the effect of the war of 1914-18, which succeeded in debunking both Science, Progress and civilised man. Progress had finally ended in the biggest massacre in history, Science was something that created bombing planes and poison gas, civilised man, as it turned out, was ready to behave worse than any savage when the pinch came.156

He again displayed his scepticism towards Wells’s advocacy of world unity in his

‘Review of ’42 to ’44’ (1944), and was particularly unimpressed by his ‘by now

familiar idea that mankind must either develop a World State or perish’, comparing

Wells to a nursemaid scolding a naughty child: ‘“Now, you’ll take your nice medicine

or the bogey-man’ll come and eat you up.” Homo sapiens must do what he is told or

he will become extinct’.157

Understandably, Orwell’s assessments of Wells did little to promote good relations

between the two writers. At a dinner party held by Inez Holden in 1941, Wells and

Orwell had a ‘God-awful row’, both brandishing copies of the Horizon in which

‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ was printed. Later, following the publication of

‘The Re-discovery of Europe’, Orwell recorded in his war-time diary receiving an

‘[a]busive letter from H. G. Wells, who addresses me as “You shit”, among other

things’.158

156 Orwell, ‘Re-discovery’, 214, 212. In the next chapter, I will return to the subject of Wells’s and Lawrence’s opposed attitudes towards progress. 157 George Orwell, ‘Review of ’42 to ’44: A Contemporary Memoir upon Human Behaviour During the Crisis of the World Revolution by H. G. Wells’ (1944), in Complete Works, xvi, 197-9, 197-8. See also Orwell’s obituary of Wells, ‘The True Pattern of H. G. Wells’ (1946), in The Lost Orwell: Being a Supplement to The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (London: Timewell Press, 2006), 136-40. 158 See Davison, Complete Works, xiii, 250; for an account of the dinner party, see Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, 3rd edn (London: Penguin, 1992), 427-31. Orwell, diary entry for 27 March 1942, in Complete Works, xiii, 249.

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What are we to make of Orwell’s attack, which, as Partington observes, ‘continues to

blight Wells’s reputation as a political thinker to this day’?159 Many have rallied to

Wells’s defence. In a letter which was published in the Listener, Wells himself replied

irately to ‘The Re-discovery of Europe’, suggesting that Orwell had completely

mischaracterized his position as a belief that ‘the world would be saved from its

gathering distresses by “science”’.160 Subsequent critics have similarly argued that

Wells did not hold a blind faith in science, and was no naïve apologist for a Victorian

belief in progress.161 Most comprehensively, Partington has sought to rebut Orwell’s

charges on a point-by-point basis.162 He has usefully situated the clash between the

two writers in the context of their very different brands of socialism, showing how

Orwell’s support of patriotism as a means of resisting Hitler conflicts with Wells’s

cosmopolitan politics.163 He argues that with the suggestion that Wells’s plans for a

World State find their true manifestation in Nazi Germany, Orwell reaches ‘the height

of ridiculousness’.164

It should certainly be acknowledged that Orwell badly misrepresented Wells’s

position. Most importantly, Wells did not hold a blind faith in science and technology

to bring about progress. Neverthesless, we should not forget that Wells was a staunch

advocate of the idea of progress, and that such advocacy is still open to critique.

Rather than exonerate Wells, closer scrutiny should be given to the politics of his

view of progress, which I propose to do by re-reading Orwell’s attack on Wells

159 John S. Partington, ‘The Pen as Sword: George Orwell, H. G. Wells and Journalistic Parricide’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39/1 (Jan. 2004), 45-56, 45. 160 H. G. Wells, letter published in The Listener on 9 April 1942; reprinted in Orwell, Complete Works, xiii, 218. 161 See Anthony West, ‘The Dark World of H. G. Wells’, Harper’s Magazine, 214 (May 1957), 68-73; Reed, Natural History, 258, 97-8; Wagar, World State, 80-7, and Traversing Time, 251. 162 See Cosmopolis, 14-5, 120, and ‘Sword’. 163 Partington, ‘Sword’, 54. 164 Partington, Cosmopolis, 15.

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through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s closely-contemporaneous critique of progress

in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1941).

Benjamin’s celebrated critique of progress in his ‘Theses’ is crystallized in the

famous image of ‘the angel of history’, who watches the wreckage piling at his feet as

he is propelled into the future by the storm of progress. In the ‘struggle against

Fascism’, Benjamin portrayed it as imperative to combat conceptions of history which

are based around the idea of progress, because ‘one reason why Fascism has a chance

is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm’.165

Benjamin’s contention that a concept of progress benefitted Fascism stands as a

suggestive complement to Orwell’s argument that Wells’s faith in progress eventually

culminated in Nazi Germany. Benjamin drew attention to the role that the idea of

progress played in the corruption of the German working class. This class supposedly

‘regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it

was moving’, and ‘[f]rom there it was but a small step to the illusion that the factory

work which was supposed to tend towards technological progress constituted a

political achievement’.166 It is true that Wells did not hold a blind faith in science and

technology as means of securing progress. Nevertheless, Orwell’s argument that

Wells confused ‘mechanical progress with justice, liberty and common decency’

implies a similar point to that of Benjamin: that a conception of ‘progress’ that does

not admit an adequate distinction between technological and political progress is

politically dangerous.

165 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 249. 166 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 250.

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Benjamin accused one popular strain of vulgar-Marxism of recognizing ‘only the

progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays

the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism’.167 Once again, this suggestion

stands as a suggestive counterpart to Orwell’s critique of Wells’s conception of

progress, and his claim that ‘[m]uch of what Wells had imagined and worked for is

physically there in Nazi Germany’. Indeed, Orwell subverted the progressive scheme

of Wells’s Outline by suggesting that ‘[t]he order, the planning, the State

encouragement of science’ that Wells so valued were present in Nazi Germany ‘in the

service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age’. That is, because Wells’s historical

scheme does not admit of an adequate distinction between technological and political

progress, he can only account for Hitler as an aberrational revenant from primitive

times: ‘[c]reatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if

they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them’.168

More generally, Benjamin’s objections in the ‘Theses’ to progressive schemes of

history apply to Wells’s conception of history. Wells’s view of history conforms

closely to Benjamin’s targeted position of ‘historicism’. This is a view which is

animated by a concept of progress, tends to employ historical narrative, and ‘rightly

culminates in universal history’.169 Correlatively, the differences between Wells’s

histories and Benjamin’s preferred ‘historical materialism’ are equally marked. While

Wells employs a scheme of progress, Benjamin rejects progress; while Wells favours

historical narrative, Benjamin replaces narrative with the ‘constellation’ and the

167 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 251. 168 Orwell, ‘Hitler’, 539-40. 169 On Benjamin’s conception of ‘historicism’, and on other varieties of historicism which are not committed to progress, see Osborne, Politics of Time, 138-40. One notable respect in which Wells’s universal histories differ from Benjamin’s historicism is that they are not underpinned by a conception of homogenous empty time. Rather, as was seen above, they are underpinned by a kairological time.

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‘dialectical image’; and while Wells’s history is ‘fundamentally a history of ideas’,

Benjamin’s approach to history is materialist.170

Orwell’s inflammatory alignment of Wells’s World State with Nazi Germany

intimates that Wells’s cosmopolitan politics are complicit with a form of aggressive

imperialism.171 Indeed, the progressive scheme of Wells’s deep histories might be

suspected of an historical neo-imperialism. Orwell objected to Wells’s proposal for a

document codifying the ‘Universal Rights of Man’, casting doubt on the purported

universality of this document: ‘Mr. Wells is not ready to admit that his declaration of

the “Rights of Man” is a purely Western document. Almost any Indian, for instance,

would reject it at a glance’.172 A parallel point could be made about Wells’s histories

and their overarching concept of progress, which is an equally ‘Western’ concept. In

this light, his plan to have his histories or similar versions ‘translated into every

language’ and distributed ‘throughout all the world’ constitutes an imperialist plan to

disseminate and propagate a Western conception of history.173

Furthermore, the progressive scheme of Wells’s histories arguably supports a neo-

imperialist politics. While Wells criticized Alexander the Great’s empire and the

Roman Empire, he neverthesless identifies them as foreshadowing the coming World

170 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 255; Wells, Outline, 565. Conversely, perhaps the most salient similarity between Wells’s and Benjamin’s otherwise vastly different approaches to history is the use they make of the services of theology, which, as Benjamin points out, has become ‘wizened and has to keep out of sight’ (‘Theses’, 245). Whereas Wells turns to a Christian Biblical scheme of history, Benjamin has recourse to Jewish Messianism. 171 The Marxist critic Christopher Caudwell similarly portrayed Wells’s world state as ‘a giant ultra-Imperialistic democratic world-state’ that is, ultimately, Fascist (Studies in a Dying Culture (London: John Lane, 1938), 87). 172 Orwell, ‘Review of ’42 to ’44’, 197-8. 173 See Wells, Salvaging, 136. I will return to the issue of historical imperialism in the conclusion to this study.

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State.174 Suspicion might be raised by the fact that two of the most aggressive and

brutal military empires in history are celebrated as portents of world unity. Such a

suspicion is reinforced by Wells’s advocacy of ‘empire pooling’, in which existing

empires are to be combined into a ‘Super-Empire’. In the Outline, he suggests that a

‘League of Nations that is to be of any appreciable value to mankind must supersede

imperialisms; it is either a super-imperialism . . . or it is nothing’.175 Similarly, he

proposed in his contemporary writing on empire that the colonial subjects of the

various existing empires should be administered by a central organization, which

would have the power, among other things, to exploit the natural resources of those

colonies.176

Wells’s histories seek to break away from nationalism and from nationalist

imperialism, yet they do so only to threaten a new form of transnational imperialism.

Such a form of neo-imperialism is arguably more insidious precisely because it rejects

a transparently partisan national basis, and operates instead under the banners of a

supposedly universal and disinterested cosmopolitanism. To follow this line of

argument is to suggest that, by aiming to create citizens fit for a World State by the

propagation of ‘common historical ideas’, Wells’s deep histories lie at the heart of a

neo-imperialist project.

* * *

In this chapter, I have demonstrated how Wells moved beyond the early cosmic

pessimism of The Time Machine to make political use of geological time. Most fully, 174 Wells, Outline, 219, 277. 175 Wells, Outline, 592. 176 See Partington, Cosmopolis, 109-13.

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we have investigated the politics of the deep time of his universal histories. D. H.

Lawrence and Virginia Woolf held conceptions of history markedly different from

that of Wells, and their work is marked by similarly contrasting politics of time.

While Wells advanced a linear scheme of universal history, in which humanity

progresses from a shared biological origin in the remote geological past towards the

telos of a World State, both Lawrence and Woolf challenged and subverted linear,

progressive forms of history.

Lawrence followed Friedrich Nietzsche in his assault on linear schemes of history,

and proposed in their place cyclical conceptions of history both in Movements in

European History (1921) and in Apocalypse (1931). The latter work reinterprets the

Book of Revelation to herald not the end of history, but rather the dawn of a new

pagan age. As we shall see below, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) dramatises such an

epochal rupture, and a concomitant Nietzschean transvaluation of values. Given his

advocacy of cyclical conceptions of history, Lawrence’s antipathy towards Wells’s

universal histories is understandable. In his essay ‘Him with His Tail in His Mouth’

(1925), he insouciantly inverted Wells’s progressive scheme of history: ‘[h]adn’t

somebody better write Mr Wells’ History backwards, to prove how we’ve

degenerated, in our stupid visionlessness, since the cave-men?’177 In his novella St

Mawr (1925), Wells’s Outline is treated similarly dismissively by the Dean, who

comments wryly that ‘Mr Wells’ Outline’ does nothing to help him to imagine Europe

before the time of the Greeks.178

177 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Him With His Tail in His Mouth’, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 307-17, 317. 178 D. H. Lawrence, St Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 65. In the novella, Flora takes a much more positive attitude towards Wells’s history, and defends a very un-Lawrentian position: ‘“I think this is the best age there ever was, for a girl to have a good time in. I read all through H. G. Wells’ history, and I shut it up and thanked my stars I live in

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Virginia and Leonard Woolf published a series of Wells’s political lectures,

pamphlets and books at the Hogarth Press during the 1920s and 1930s, in which he

continued to propagate his ideas for a world state, world peace and the teaching of

world history.179 Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), engages directly with

Wells’s conception of history. As critics have observed, his Outline is the principal

model for Lucy Swithin’s ‘Outline of History’.180 However, given Wells’s persistent

argument that a form of world history was urgently required if another world war

were to be avoided, the fact that Lucy reads a Wellsian history on the eve of war is

deeply ironic.181 Moreover, Wells’s grand historical narratives are comically deflated

in Woolf’s novel. Having been reading her Outline in bed, Lucy is unable mentally to

separate her maid Grace from a ‘leather-covered grunting monster’ in a ‘primeval

forest’. She gives her a divided glance that ‘was half meant for a beast in a swamp,

half for a maid in a print frock and white apron’.182 While prehistoric animals

foreshadow modern forms of society in Wells’s histories, Lucy is so immersed in her

nineteen-twenty odd, not in some other beastly date when a woman had to cringe before mouldy domineering men”’ (74). 179 See, for example, H. G. Wells, The Common Sense of World Peace: An Address Delivered in the Reichstag at Berlin, on Monday April 15th, 1929 (London: Hogarth Press, 1929); and The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution, rev. edn (London: Hogarth Press, 1930). Virginia and Leonard kept copies of both of these works in their private library: see Julia King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic (eds), The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-Title Catalogue (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2003), 240-1. 180 See, for example, Mitchell A. Leaska, (ed.), Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts (New York: University Publications, 1983), 246, 441. Gillian Beer suggests that Woolf ‘amalgamates’ Wells’s Outline of History with his Short History of the World, and ‘writes her own version rather than quoting Wells directly’ (Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 21). 181 In Three Guineas (1938), Woolf responded with a similar irony to Wells’s comment in his Autobiography (1934) that ‘[t]here has been no perceptible woman’s movement to resist the practical obliteration of their freedom by Fascists or Nazis’ (Wells, Autobiography, 486, quoted in Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own; Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 214). She tartly responds in a footnote that although the men’s movement to resist fascism may have been more perceptible, it is doubtful that ‘it has been more successful’ given that, at the time of writing, the Nazis ‘now control the whole of Austria’ (383). 182 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. Mark Hussey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7.

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history that she has comic difficulty separating the Wellsian figure (the grunting

prehistoric monster) from its fulfillment (Grace).183

In Between the Acts, Miss La Trobe’s village pageant also partially resembles Wells’s

universal histories, most notably by being a grand historical narrative that runs from

primeval times to the present day.184 However, the story told by the pageant is not,

like that of Wells, one of progress. On the contrary, as we shall see, the relentless

ticking of a gramophone whose needle has stuck conveys a repetitive form of

historical time. It suggests that history is not one of progress, but rather is marked by

a nightmarish repetition of patriarchal violence and war.

183 In an early draft of the novel, Lucy’s Outline takes on a fantastic, unreal quality as the historical is mixed with the fictional: she is described as ‘enchanted like a child by the story of the prehistoric world’, and goes to bed ‘rubbing her eyes, but still seeing the giant and . . . the unicorns, and the mastodons, and the mammoths’ (Pointz Hall, 184). 184 The pageant tells the story of England’s past and is thereby, unlike Wells’s histories, a form of national history.

PART 2:

D. H. LAWRENCE AND NIETZSCHE’S THOUGHT OF ETERNAL

RECURRENCE

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2.1. Cyclical History

The politics of D. H. Lawrence and his work are notorious, and, according to his

detractors, deeply reactionary. As Terry Eagleton observes, Lawrence’s champions

‘since the 1960s have been growing thinner on the ground by the year’.1 Indeed, since

his critical heyday when he was influentially championed by F. R. Leavis as forming

part of ‘the great tradition’, his reputation has suffered from a number of critical

attacks. His work has been extensively critiqued from a feminist perspective, perhaps

most influentially by Kate Millett in her Sexual Politics (1970).2 Moreover, his

sympathy for authoritarian politics, and his alarming views of race, which find fullest

expression in his ‘leadership novels’ of the 1920s, have been widely criticized.

Eagleton encapsulates such an approach when he claims that the leadership novels are

characterised by ‘a proto-fascist veneration of power, “blood-hierarchy”, racial purity,

male bonding, charismatic leadership, the revival of “primitive ritual” and mythology,

and the brutal subjugation of women’.3 However, while Lawrence’s views of women

and his authoritarian politics are the subjects of long-running critical debates, what is

less clear is the political nature of his critique of what he calls ‘the industrial system’,

and the various alternatives that he advocated in its place.4 Such an issue is timely,

given the relatively recent emergence of ecocriticism, and the attention that Lawrence

has been receiving from ecocritics.

1 Terry Eagleton, The English Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 256. 2 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Sphere Books, 1971). For a survey and assessment of feminist approaches to Lawrence, see Robert Burden, Radicalizing Lawrence: Critical Interventions in the Reading and Reception of D. H. Lawrence’s Narrative Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 288-308. 3 Eagleton, English Novel, 278. 4 Letter to Charles Wilson, 15 January 1928; The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 267.

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Recent ecocritical approaches have generated more affirmative readings of a ‘green

Lawrence’. Before the emerge of ecocriticism as a self-conscious literary-critical

movement, Lawrence had long been celebrated as a ‘nature’ writer. For example,

Leavis venerated his exploration of ‘the malady of industrial civilization’.5 Since then,

Lawrence has been portrayed as a forerunner and a source of inspiration for the ‘deep

ecology’ movement, and has been celebrated by deep ecological critics such Del Ivan

Janik, and Dolores LaChapelle in her Future Primitive (1996).6 Taking a different

approach, Anne Fernihough has argued that Lawrence advanced a ‘green aesthetics’

similar to those of Martin Heidegger. She situates both Lawrence and Heidegger in

the same tradition of völkish ideologies, and suggests that, while these ideologies have

caused Lawrence to be linked to fascism, they also bring him close ‘to some

contemporary “eco-feminist” writers’.7

Ecocriticism has raised the prospect of a re-evaluation of Lawrence’s politics.

However, if such a re-evaluation is to take place, what should be avoided are the

shortcomings of earlier Leavistite and deep ecological critics, who isolated ‘green’

aspects of Lawrence, and celebrated these without regard for the other political

aspects of his writing. Arguably, the Leavisite celebration of a green Lawrence was

itself politically reactionary. In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams

condemned the Leavisites who failed to address Lawrence’s political aberrations

whilst paying homage to his conservative pastoral.8 Rick Rylance developed a similar

5 F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955), 71. See also Roger Ebbatson, Lawrence and the Nature Tradition: a Theme in English Fiction 1859-1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). 6 See Del Ivan Janik, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Environmental Consciousness’, Environmental Review, 7/4 (Winter 1983), 359-72, and Dolores LaChapelle, D. H. Lawrence: Future Primitive (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1996). For an overview of the ‘deep ecology’ movement, see Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012), 23-6. 7 Anne Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 171. 8 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 271.

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critique to that of Williams, suggesting that ‘[i]t truncates Lawrence’s politics to see

him as having only industrial spoliation in mind’.9 Greg Garrard argues that the

problematic aspects of the Leavisite celebration of Lawrence’s song of the earth have

been perpetuated in deep ecological approaches. The problem with such ‘deep green’

readings of Lawrence, according to Garrard, is that they fail to see that Lawrence’s

‘proto-ecological ideas’ are overtly linked to larger political arguments about labour,

nation and race, and that they tend to ignore important ‘questions of power, gender,

sexuality and religion’.10

Rejoining the environmental with the political, it might be asked: what are the politics

of Lawrence’s critique of industrial civilization? How does this critique relate to his

notorious leadership politics? Are the two separate and separable, or are they

inextricably intertwined? Is the ‘green Lawrence’ a cause for celebration, and if so,

should this contribute towards a partial rehabilitation of Lawrence’s political

reputation? While ecocritical approaches thus promise to offer new insights into

Lawrence’s writings and their politics, it might conversely be asked: what might

Lawrence’s writing contribute to the expanding discipline of ecocriticsm?

In this chapter, I wish to address such questions through the politics of time, and more

specifically, by means of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence.

Drawing a comparison with the use of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence in

the contemporary philosophical discourse of modernity, I will argue that Lawrence

adapted this doctrine, and fused it with an apocalyptic shape of history, in both his

9 Rick Rylance, ‘Lawrence’s Politics’, in Keith Brown (ed.), Rethinking Lawrence (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), 163-80, 175-8. 10 Greg Garrard, ‘Nietzsche Contra Lawrence: How to be True to the Earth’, Colloquy, 12 (2006), 9-27, 21-4, 10.

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historical and fictional writing. Having addressed Lawrence’s conception of history as

expressed in his Movements in European History (1921), I will go on to offer

ecocritical readings of Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).

Recognizing that Lawrence creatively adapted Nietzsche’s thought of eternal

recurrence allows a reassessment of his politics, and more specifically, of his

environmental politics.

The Politics of Eternal Recurrence

As Peter Osborne remarks, Friedrich Nietzsche is, as ‘the thinker of eternal return’,

‘the philosopher of modernity par excellence’.11 Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal

recurrence is first put forward in The Gay Science (1882), forms the fundamental

conception (Grundconception) or fundamental thought (Grundgedanke) of Thus

Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5), and is the subject of many of the notes collected in The

Will to Power (1901-11).12 Eternal recurrence, as taught by Zarathustra in ‘On the

Vision and the Riddle’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is the doctrine that ‘whatever can

happen’ must ‘already have happened’ an infinite number of times, and likewise must

happen ‘once more’ an infinite number of times: we must ‘return eternally’.13 This

doctrine is one of the most of the difficult and perplexing in all of Nietzsche’s

writings; it has generated, and continues to generate, a vast number of different

11 Osborne, Politics of Time, 137. For Osborne, Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence constitutes a philosophical articulation of the temporality of modernity, and of the novel temporal experience of ‘the new as the “ever-same”’ (12). 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §341, 273-4. See, for example, Book IV Section III, ‘The Eternal Recurrence’, in The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 544-50. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 69-152, 123-4. 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 126.

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interpretations.14 Taking a historical perspective, we can note that the thought of

eternal recurrence was employed in the early twentieth century as part of what Jürgen

Habermas has called ‘the philosophical discourse of modernity’.15 Writers such as

Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin all employed Nietzsche’s

thought to articulate various politically-charged stances towards modernity.

In Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same (1935), Karl Löwith

claimed that the thought of eternal recurrence is ‘the core of Nietzsche’s whole

philosophy’.16 For Löwith, Nietzsche’s teaching of eternal recurrence comprises two

parts which are, ultimately, incompatible. On the one hand, the thought of eternal

recurrence is a cosmological doctrine, which re-presents in the terms of the natural

science of Nietzsche’s day an ancient cosmology: that the physical universe repeats

itself endlessly. On the other hand, the thought in its anthropological form is an

‘ethical’ imperative: live in every moment so that you could will that moment back

again over and over endlessly. In this anthropological form, the teaching is an

‘atheistic gospel’, which replaces the Christian belief in immortality with the will to

self-eternalization.17 On Löwith’s interpretation, Nietzsche’s teaching of eternal

recurrence constitutes an attempt to restore a pre-Socratic view of the world ‘on the

peak of modernity’: ‘[a]t the end of an exhausted Christianity, [Nietzsche] sought

“new sources of the future,” and found them in the recollection of that ancient world

as it was before Christianity’.18

14 Lawrence J. Hatab distinguishes five types of critical interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence: cosmological, existential, normative, symbolic, and ontological (Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence (New York; London: Routledge, 2005), 115-25). 15 See Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. 16 Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1997), 187. 17 Löwith, Eternal Recurrence, 83-94. Löwith’s interpretation thereby spans Hatab’s ‘cosmological’ and ‘normative’ categories of interpretation (see Life Sentence, 117). 18 Löwith, Eternal Recurrence, 95, 119.

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Martin Heidegger also granted the thought of eternal recurrence a preeminent position

in his writings on Nietzsche, claiming that ‘Nietzsche’s fundamental metaphysical

position is captured in his doctrine of the eternal return of the same’.19 Like Löwith,

Heidegger stressed the world-historical nature of the thought of eternal recurrence.

Supposedly, this thought was designed to overcome the age of Christian-Platonism by

rethinking its constitutive distinction between being and becoming through the

standpoint of the moment (and hence through time): the thinker of the thought of

eternal recurrence wills the infinite repetition of the moment, and by adopting this

temporal stance, ‘stamps becoming with the character of being’.20 Such an

achievement promises to inaugurate a new, Zarathustran age, marked by a revaluation

of the earth and of the body which had been so despised by Christian-Platonism.

However, Heidegger became increasingly hostile towards Nietzsche, arguing that the

thought of eternal recurrence failed to overcome the metaphysical tradition (the

history of philosophy as Platonism), but rather stood as its virulent consummation.21 It

did not herald the redemption of the earth, but instead paved the way for the unbridled

technological mastery of the planet in the age of modernity. David Farrell Krell

summarises this increasingly hostile attitude:

19 Heidegger offered four lecture courses on Nietzsche’s philosophy at the University of Freiburg-im-Bresgau between 1936 and 1940. These, together with a number of individual essays and lectures composed between 1936-46, and another lecture course on Nietzsche in the 1950s, are published in English as the four-volume Nietzsche, translated and edited by David Farrell Krell. As Hatab notes, Heidegger advanced the most important ‘ontological’ interpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence (Life Sentence, 124). 20 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell, ii (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 41, 57, 202-3. Heidegger stresses that Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence is to be thought ‘[o]nly by way of . . . the moment’ (183, emphasis removed). 21 Heidegger’s interpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence thereby differs markedly from that of Löwith. Indeed, Löwith strenuously contested Heidegger’s interpretation, arguing that ‘Nietzsche’s thinking does not complete the self-certain subjectivity of modernity, but instead is a “new beginning” after the end of the Christian interpretation of existence’ (Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin, trans. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 122).

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Heidegger comes to take will-to-power as . . . machination, eternal return as a symbol of the dynamo, and overman as the technical giant bent on world conquest. . . . [I]t becomes increasingly difficult to hear the music of Zarathustra’s new lyre.22

Thus, in ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead”’ (1943), Heidegger interpreted

Nietzsche’s philosophy to be the consummation of metaphysics which precipitates the

‘struggle for dominion over the earth’: with the death of God, and the coming of the

overman, the earth ‘can show itself only as the object of an assault . . . Nature appears

everywhere . . . as the object of technology’.23

Walter Benjamin’s approach to Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence in his

unfinished Arcades Project (1941) differs from that of both Löwith and Heidegger.24

Benjamin displayed an interest in the thought of eternal recurrence as it emerged at

roughly the same time in the worlds of Charles Baudelaire, Louis-Auguste Blanqui

and Friedrich Nietzsche.25 The thought of eternal recurrence served him in his

opposition to historicism, which he held to be characterized by a concept of progress

that is underpinned by a form of empty homogenous time.26 He confronts the belief in

progress with the thought of eternal recurrence as a strategy to unsettle such a

homogenous time: ‘[t]he belief in progress . . . and the representation of eternal return

are . . . the indissoluble antinomies in the face of which the dialectical conception of

historical time must be developed’.27 He moves towards such a dialectical conception

of time by fusing Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence with Karl Marx’s analysis 22 David Farrell Krell, ‘Analysis’, Nietzsche, ii, 267. 23 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 100. 24 Benjamin, Arcades Project; see in particular Convolute D, ‘Boredom, Eternal Return’, 101-19. The Arcades Project includes numerous extracts from Löwith’s Eternal Recurrence (1935). Benjamin reworked much of his Arcades Project material on eternal recurrence in his ‘Central Park’ (1939), which he intended to develop into his never-realised book on Baudelaire. 25 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 25; compare ‘Central Park’, in Selected Writings, iv, 175. 26 ‘In the idea of eternal recurrence’, writes Benjamin, ‘the historicism of the nineteenth century capsizes’ (Arcades Project, 116). 27 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 119.

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of the ‘exact repetition’ involved in modern industrial production, found in the

chapter on ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’ in the first volume of Capital (1867).28

The thought of eternal recurrence is reinterpreted in terms of the temporality of

commodity production: each commodity that is produced under modern conditions of

labour appears as both the new and as the ever-always-the-same (das Neue und

Immergleiche). As Osborne points out, such a temporality comes for Benjamin to

define modernity, as that of the ‘now’ that marks out the exact repetition of the new as

the ever-same.29 On the one hand, this temporality of modernity forms part of

Benjamin’s projected depiction of ‘modernity as Hell’. However, on the other hand,

corresponding to the dual structure of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence as

both the most abyssal manifestation of nihilism and its joyful overcoming, it displays

a more positive aspect.30 It brings the hope of breaking into a new form of historical

experience, and into a redeemed future. As Benjamin puts it, the idea of eternal

recurrence ‘conjures the speculative idea . . . of happiness from the misery of the

times’.31 It is a crucial step on the way to Benjamin’s conception of a revolutionary

historical time. As Osborne puts it, the thought of eternal recurrence marks a

departure in the experience of the repetitive succession of identical instants—

abstractly projected onto history by historicism as the blank chronologism of

‘homogenous empty time’—into a new qualitative experience of the ‘now’ as an

28 See Osborne, Politics of Time, 143, 229. 29 Osborne, Politics of Time, 137, 143. 30 James McFarland points out that Benjamin was influenced by Löwith’s presentation of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence as ‘a nihilism that simultaneously overcomes itself’, a dual aspect that ‘is explicitly historicized in Benjamin’s account’ (Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 236). 31 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, 184.

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historical present, which contains within its static, monadic structure the equivalent to

a Messianic ‘cessation of happening’.32

In this chapter, I will use Heidegger’s, Löwith’s, and Benjamin’s interpretations of

Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence to address Lawrence’s politics. In The

Politics of Time, Osborne has convincingly argued that the concept of ‘modernity’ is a

site of political contestation, which contains within its most abstract temporal form a

range of competing temporalizations of history. In a rare mention of modernist

literary figures, he points out that Italian futurism, the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra

Pound, and the novels of Wyndham Lewis, have long been recognized as examples of

politically reactionary modernism, and intimates that the work of these figures shares

a common temporal structure with political and philosophical versions of reactionary

modernism. He intriguingly suggests that ‘the temporal structure of such phenomena

contains the key to a broader understanding of the politics of reaction more

generally’.33 Here, I want to exploit Osborne’s insight, and to approach the politics of

Lawrence’s literary modernism through the politics of time. Using Heidegger,

Löwith, and Benjamin as philosophical analogues, I will address Lawrence’s politics

through his literary adaptations of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence.

Ultimately, I will suggest that Lawrence’s adaptation of the thought of eternal

recurrence in Women in Love in many ways parallels Heidegger’s interpretation of

that thought, whereas his adaptation in Lady Chatterley’s Lover more closely

resembles that of Löwith.

32 Osborne, Politics of Time, 143. Compare McFarland’s contention that Benjamin’s notion of ‘dialectics at a standstill’ is a development of Nietzsche’s portrayal of the thought of eternal recurrence as ‘a Medusa head’ (Constellation, 236). 33 Osborne, Politics of Time, 166.

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The importance of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence in Lawrence’s writing

has hitherto been underestimated. Of course, it is well known that ‘Lawrence found

Nietzsche’, as Jessie Chambers puts it in an often-quoted passage from her memoir of

Lawrence, in Croydon Central Library in 1908-9: ‘I began to hear about the “Will to

Power”, and perceived that he had come upon something new and engrossing’.34

There is an extensive critical literature on the relationship between Lawrence and

Nietzsche.35 However, within this literature, very few critics have paid attention to the

thought of eternal recurrence. By way of exception, both Cecilia Björkén and Carl

Krockel have argued persuasively that Lawrence engages with this thought in his

early fiction.36 Perhaps the reason that the doctrine of eternal recurrence has received

so little attention from Lawrence critics is that Lawrence apparently rejected the

doctrine in his ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (written 1914-5). Therein, he writes that

‘Nietzsche talks about the Ewige Wiederkehr [eternal recurrence]. . . . But each cycle

is different. There is no real recurrence’.37 However, I will argue that behind this

apparent rejection (which even in the context of the essay is equivocal), lies a deeper

engagement with Nietzsche’s thought. Indeed, I will argue that Nietzsche’s thought of

eternal recurrence appears throughout Lawrence’s work in various modified, altered

and transformed guises. 34 Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by E. T. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 120. Rose Marie Burwell usefully reports that the Croydon Central Library possessed the following works of Nietzsche by the time that Lawrence left school in 1911: The Future of Educational Institutions (1872), Human, All-Too-Human (1878-9), Joyful Wisdom (1882-7), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-5), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Twilight of the Gods (1888), and Will to Power (1901) (‘A Checklist of Lawrence’s Reading’, in A D. H. Lawrence Handbook, ed. Keith Sagar (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 59-125, 69). 35 See, in particular, Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987); Robert E. Montgomery, The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994); T. R. Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Carl Krockel, D. H. Lawrence and Germany: The Politics of Influence (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 36 Cecilia Björkén, Into the Isle of Self: Nietzschean Patterns and Contrasts in D. H. Lawrence’s The Trespasser (Lund: Lund University Press, 1996), 152, 174, 207, 212-3; Krockel, Lawrence and Germany, 66-9, 89, 132-3, 170, 189-90. 37 D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 72.

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Methodologically, my approach follows that of Colin Milton, who counsels against

looking for ‘a mechanical and external application of Nietzsche’s ideas in Lawrence’s

work’, and suggests instead that what is involved is ‘a creative absorption and

development of them which issues in a richly detailed and specific fictional world’.38

In line with Milton’s approach, I suggest that Nietzsche’s thought of eternal

recurrence is not simply mechanically applied in Lawrence’s writing. Lawrence never

contended that history repeats itself exactly. Nevertheless, he advanced a cyclical

conception of history to very Nietzschean effect in Movements in European History;

as we shall see, a very similar scheme of history lies behind the fictional world of

Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Lawrence’s Conception of History

As Louise Williams has remarked, D. H. Lawrence was one of a number of modernist

writers who advanced cyclical conceptions of history.39 His view that history forms a

cycle contrasts markedly with H. G. Wells’s conception of history as one of linear

progress. As we saw in the previous chapter, George Orwell astutely drew attention to

this difference, contrasting Wells’s belief in progress with the rejection of that idea by

Lawrence and other writers of his generation such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra

Pound, Aldous Huxley and Wyndham Lewis.40 In this section, I will address

Lawrence’s cyclical conceptions of history in Movements in European History (1921)

and Apocalypse (1931). As we will see, Lawrence’s conception of history carries a

38 Milton, Lawrence, 21. 39 See Louise Blakeney Williams, Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics and the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 40 Orwell, ‘Re-discovery’, 212.

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very different politics to that of Wells. Whereas Wells’s teleological scheme of

history supported his political ambition of bringing into being a cosmopolitan World

State, Lawrence’s cyclical conception of history in Movements did not support a

cosmopolitan politics, or indeed any form of democratic politics; rather, it supported

his desire for an authoritarian Caesarist leader. Orwell provided early warning of

Lawrence and other modernists’ schemes of history. Although Orwell rejected the

idea of progress in history, and for that reason welcomed Lawrence’s view of life as

‘at least an advance on the Science-worship of H. G. Wells or the shallow Fabian

progressivism of writers like Bernard Shaw’, he also flagged the politically alarming

aspect of countervailing schemes of history. He points out that many contemporary

writers’ ‘revulsion from a shallow conception of progress drove them politically in

the wrong direction, and it isn’t an accident that Ezra Pound, for instance, is now

shouting anti-Semitism on the Rome radio’.41 As we shall see, Orwell’s insight

applies just as well to Lawrence as it does to Pound, and it is true that, by supporting

his authoritarian leadership politics, Lawrence’s cyclical conception of history drove

him, as Orwell puts it, ‘politically in the wrong direction’.

Despite the relatively little critical attention it has received, Lawrence’s Movements in

European History contains the fullest formulation of his conception of history, and is

invaluable for understanding his novels. Movements is a history textbook for

secondary schools commissioned by Oxford University Press, written in 1918-9, and

first published in 1921 under the pseudonym ‘Lawrence H. Davison’.42 It is an

account of European history from the founding of Rome in 753 B.C. to the late 41 Orwell, ‘Re-discovery’, 214, 216. 42 A further illustrated edition was published in 1925 under Lawrence’s real name; a revised edition for Irish schools was published in 1926; and a new edition, with a previously unpublished Epilogue (which had been written in 1924) was published in 1971. All further references are to Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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nineteenth century.43 The history draws heavily on secondary sources, most of which

were written between 1908 and 1917, but which also include Julius Caesar’s Gallic

War, Tacitus’ Germania (c. 98), and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire (1776-89).44 As Philip Crumpton comments, although Lawrence’s

method ‘was largely a narration of events drawn from his sources, rather than his own

meanings and interpretations’, a distinctive philosophy of history emerges from the

text.45 Lawrence commented in his correspondence on the ‘developing significance’

that emerged as he wrote the history: ‘I do loathe the broken pots of historical facts.

But once I can get hold of the thread of the developing significance, then I am happy,

and get ahead’. He added that ‘[t]here is a clue of developing meaning running

through it: that makes it real to me’.46 This ‘developing meaning’, which constitutes

Lawrence’s metaphysic of history, is expressed in the work’s combination of a

Joachite epochal structure with a pseudo-Nietzschean cyclical form. Lawrence fuses

these forms in a complementary manner, and from them derives imperatives of

leadership.

As has been recognized, Lawrence’s history is apocalyptic. In Movements, Lawrence

gives an account of two different forms of apocalypticism: the early Christian belief

in the Millennium, which signals an end to history, and a Joachite apocalyptic rupture,

which signals the inauguration of a new historical epoch.47 He is hostile to the first

type of apocalypticism, which, as T. R. Wright points out, he criticises by reproducing

43 The ‘Epilogue’, written in 1924, brings the history up to the present of writing. 44 Philip Crumpton’s appendix to the Cambridge Edition of Movements in European History lists Lawrence’s sources. See also his ‘Introduction’, xxxviii-xlvi, and ‘DHL and the Sources of Movements in European History’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 29 (1985), 50-65. 45 Crumpton, ‘Introduction’, xlii. 46 Letter to Nancy Henry, 23 January 1919; The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 322. 47 Lawrence, Movements, 31.

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almost verbatim Nietzschean’s argument that the desire for the Millennium is the

fantasy of a slave class, avenging itself on the powerful ‘by imagining the sudden

destruction of the world to be near at hand’.48 However, Lawrence is far more

sympathetic to the second type of apocalypticism. In the twelfth chapter of

Movements, he outlines Joachim di Fiore’s (c. 1135-1202) interpretation of history:

[i]n 1254 a book was published called Introduction to the Everlasting Gospel, supposed to contain the teaching of a famous seer or prophet, the Abbot Joachim, who had died at Naples in 1202. In this book it said that Judaism was the revelation of the Father: Christianity was the revelation of the Son: now men must prepare for the revelation of the Holy Ghost.49

The most immediate source for Lawrence’s description of the Joachite doctrine is R.

B. Mowat’s The Later Middle Ages: A History of Western Europe 1254-1494

(1917).50 Mowat gives an account of ‘the Abbot Joachim of Flora’, the Introduction to

the Everlasting Gospel, and the three stages of history: Judaism, which ‘had been the

revelation of the Father’, Christianity, which was ‘the revelation of the Son’, and the

future age which was to be ‘the revelation of the Holy Ghost’.51 In Movements,

Lawrence describes Joachim’s work as having, in spite of being condemned by the

Popes, ‘a great power over the minds of men’:

48 Wright, Bible, 48. 49 Lawrence, Movements, 147. 50 This source has been overlooked by Peter Fjågesund, Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, who suggest that Lawrence’s knowledge of Joachim may have been derived from G. G. Coulton’s From St Francis to Dante: A Translation of All that is of Primary Interest in the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene (1221-1288) (1906), a copy of which Lady Ottoline Morrell sent to Lawrence in 1916, and which he claimed to have loved (Peter Fjågesund, The Apocalyptic World of D. H. Lawrence (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1991), 11; Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 302; letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 15 February 1916; The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 538). 51 R. B. Mowat, The Later Middle Ages: A History of Western Europe 1254-1494 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917), 106-10. Reeves and Gould point out that Lawrence makes a ‘slip in saying that Joachim dies at Naples’, when in fact he died at Canale (Joachim, 302). This ‘slip’ seems to stem from an inattentive reading of Mowat, who wrote that Joachim was Abbot ‘in the kingdom of Naples, and died in the year 1202’ (106-7).

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[w]ild ideas spread everywhere. Men began to expect the reign of the Holy Ghost. They said that before Jesus was born the Father had reigned: after this, until their own day, the Son had reigned; now the Holy Ghost would reign.52

Following Mowat, Lawrence charts the political revolutionaries such as the Fraticelli

and the Pastoureaux who were inspired by Joachim’s doctrine in the thirteenth and

fourteenth centuries.53

In addition to giving an historical account of the ideas of Joachim, Lawrence’s own

history takes a Joachite apocalyptic form. As Movements’ commentators have pointed

out, Lawrence’s history is suggestively aligned with Joachim’s doctrine. For example,

Daniel Schneider observes that Lawrence’s European history ‘exhibits the Joachite

movement from the revelation of the Father (the Old World of Power and Union in

the Flesh) to the revelation of the Son (the New World of Love and Union in the

Spirit), but stops short of the revelation of the Holy Ghost’.54 That is, in Lawrence’s

history, the Renaissance divides European history into two ages: the pre-Renaissance

age of war and conquest corresponds to Joachim’s age of the Father; the post-

Renaissance age of production corresponds to Joachim’s age of the Son. There is also

the expectation of a third age, which corresponds to Joachim’s age of the Holy Ghost:

‘[t]here still remains the last reign of wisdom, of pure understanding, the reign which

we have never seen in the world, but which we must see’.55 However, what has yet to

52 Lawrence, Movements, 147. 53 Lawrence, Movements, 146-9; see Mowat, Middle Ages, 107-9. 54 Daniel J. Schneider, ‘Psychology in Lawrence’s Movements in European History’, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 39/2 (1985), 97-106, 103. Crumpton is more tentative: ‘[t]here is the barest hint of a Joachite interpretation of history in [Movements]’, (‘Introduction’, xliii). Frank Kermode interprets Lawrence more generally as ‘a Joachite’ (‘Lawrence and the Apocalyptic Types’, Critical Quarterly, 10 (March 1968), 14-38, 17), and in The Sense of an Ending, points out that ‘[s]ome aspects of [Joachim’s] brand of apocalypse survive in D. H. Lawrence’ (13). Fjågesund advances ‘Joachism’ as the most important of five types of history that together make up Lawrence’s ‘apocalyptic-millennial’ conception of history (Apocalyptic World, 8-13). 55 Lawrence, Movements, 167. As Schneider points out, with its ‘Joachite movement’, Movements ‘works out in detail many of the ideas that Lawrence had already suggested in “Study of Thomas Hardy” and in The Rainbow and Women in Love’ (‘Psychology’, 103).

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be recognized is that the apocalyptic form of history in Movements is fused with a

pseudo-Nietzschean cyclical structure.

Lawrence portrays European history as a cycle. Within the flood and ebb of history

driven by two opposed ‘motives’ or ‘passions’, a pivotal moment occurs at the

Renaissance:

[w]ith the Renaissance the new way of life comes into being. Men do not live just to fight and conquer and capture possessions. They live now in the joy of producing, the joy of making things.56

At this critical ‘great change’ in the Renaissance, modern nations developed, and

focused on ‘production rather than war and glory’. This movement towards peace and

production is cross-cut by another trend: the break-down of great institutions into

smaller individual powers: ‘[t]he whole history of Europe is a history of the breaking

down of great institutions to make way for smaller, more numerous, more individual

powers’.57 The effect is that European history becomes a circle:

[l]ong ago, Europe was one vast realm ruled by a gorgeous emperor in Rome. Now the circle has been almost completed again. Europe seems to move towards infinite unification, towards the institution of one vast state ruled by the infinite numbers of the people—the producers, the proletariat, the workmen.58

European history thus moves in a cycle, from one type of unity to another: ‘[s]o the

cycle of European history completes itself, phase by phase . . . Europe moves from

oneness to oneness, from the imperial unity to the unity of the labouring classes, from

the beginning to the end’. The cyclical form of European history in Movements

supports Lawrence’s assertion in the Preface that history is not teleological: ‘[w]e are

not the consummation of all life and time’.59 As already remarked, by advancing a

56 Lawrence, Movements, 166. 57 Lawrence, Movements, 241-2. 58 Lawrence, Movements, 242. 59 Lawrence, Movements, 252, 7.

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cyclic conception of history, Lawrence joined company with a number of other

modernist writers. Williams has usefully shown how modernists such as W. B. Yeats,

Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Lawrence, all ‘found progress to be

an historical structure unsuited to their needs’, and embraced instead various cyclical

views of history, which they found to be ‘far more satisfying’.60 However, although

she draws attention to the cyclical nature of Lawrence’s conception of history, what

she fails to recognize is the Nietzschean nature of this conception.61

The cyclical form of Lawrence’s history is pseudo-Nietzschean. Nietzsche advanced

his conception of eternal recurrence in opposition to linear, teleological schemes of

history. History, according to this doctrine, forms a cycle, as suggested by his

description in Ecce Homo (1888) of the doctrine as that of ‘the unconditional and

infinitely repeated cycle of all things’.62 Lawrence’s depiction of European history as

a ‘cycle’ partially resembles the cyclicity of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal

recurrence. The cyclical form of Lawrence’s European history does not conform

exactly to Nietzsche’s doctrine eternal recurrence. Lawrence’s history does not repeat

itself exactly, as the return to the beginning of the circle is marked by difference as

well as by identity: the imperial unity of the beginning of history becomes the unity of

the labouring classes of the end. Nevertheless, Lawrence drew very Nietzschean

conclusions from the cyclical shape of European history.

Lawrence welcomed a return to the strong leadership characteristic of Imperial Rome,

and the start of the cycle of European history. For Lawrence, history is driven by great 60 Williams, Ideology of History, 2. 61 Indeed, she explicitly claims that although Lawrence’s ‘scheme of history is clearly cyclic’, he ‘did not accept what he believed was Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence’, a claim which she supports by quoting Lawrence’s apparent rejection of the idea in his ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (179). 62 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 110, my emphasis.

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‘motives’ of ‘passions’ which manifest themselves in particular individuals, such as

Alexander the Great, Attila, Martin Luther, Louis XIV and Otto von Bismarck.63 In

this regard, Movements is a ‘Great Men’ version of history. Interestingly, one

reviewer in 1927 interpreted Lawrence’s Movements in Nietzschean terms,

commenting that Lawrence’s ‘prime movers in human history’ are ‘rather muddled

Teutonic Uebermensch’.64 While Lawrence’s contention that history is driven by

passional forces grants a great importance to Great Men in the past, it also opens the

possibility for another Great Man to appear with decisive historical impact in the

future. For Lawrence, the coming of such a Great Man is closely allied to the cyclical

shape of history, just as for Nietzsche, the coming of the Übermensch is intimately

tied to the thought of eternal recurrence. The last chapter of Movements looks back to

‘the great emperors leading Rome’, who were the subject of the first chapter of the

history: ‘[l]long ago, Europe was one vast realm ruled by a gorgeous emperor in

Rome. Now the circle has almost been completed again’. The cyclical return to such a

state of imperial leadership is clearly welcomed: ‘if men much fight their way

forward, they must have a leader whom all obey’.65 Movements concludes that:

a great united Europe of productive working people, all materially equal, will never be able to continue and remain firm unless it unites around one chosen figure, some hero who can lead a great war, as well as administer a wide peace. It all depends on the will of the people. But the will of the people must concentrate in one figure, who is also supreme over the will of the people.66

This ‘hero who can lead a great war’ is a Nietzschean Übermensch in its popular,

militaristic form.

63 For Lawrence, the ‘passional motive’ which drives history is ‘greater then any one man, though in individual men the power is at its greatest’ (Movements, 9). 64 Casper J. Kraemer, ‘A Poet-Historian and a Lucretian Motif’, The Classical Weekly, 20/25 (9 May 1927), 197-8, 198. 65 Lawrence, Movements, 241-2. 66 Lawrence, Movements, 252.

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The cyclical shape of history in Movements forms part of Lawrence’s increasingly

anti-democratic, authoritarian politics. By the time he wrote Movements, Lawrence’s

politics had become increasingly authoritarian. In a notorious series of letters written

to Bertrand Russell in 1915, he had counselled:

[y]ou must drop all your democracy. . . . [T]here must be a Ruler . . . an absolute Dictator . . . The thing must culminate in one real head . . . no foolish republics with foolish presidents, but an elected King, something like Julius Caesar.67

Such a rejection of democracy, in what Peter Scheckner describes as Lawrence’s

‘most reactionary statement’ up to that point, marks a dramatic movement away from

Russell’s liberal politics.68 The wish for a dictatorship, led by ‘something like Julius

Caesar’, complements the cyclical historical scheme of Movements, and the call

therein for a return to a Caesarist leader. In both cases, Lawrence’s desire for a

Caesarist leader anticipates later Caesarist political movements, such as that of Italian

Fascism and Mussolini’s self-stylization as a Roman emperor. Emile Delavenay has

criticised the political vision of Movements on similar grounds, seeing it as an

‘[a]pology for dictatorship’, and complicit with ‘movements such as those which were

to pave the way for Fascism and Nazism’.69

It should be acknowledged that, in the Epilogue to Movements, written in 1924,

Lawrence criticised the fascism that he had experienced on his visit to Italy in 1920,

describing it as ‘another kind of bullying’. Nevertheless, despite the shortcomings of

Italian fascism, Lawrence claimed that ‘[w]e must have authority, and there must be

power’. He stressed the importance of following ‘natural’ aristocrats, and concluded

67 Letters to Bertrand Russell, 14, 16 and 26 July 1915; Letters, ii, 364-5, 371, his emphasis. 68 Peter Scheckner, Class, Politics and the Individual: A Study of the Major Works of D. H. Lawrence (London: Associated University Presses, 1985), 16. 69 Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence: The Man and his Work: The Formative Years: 1885-1919, trans. Katharine M. Delavenay (London: Heinemann, 1972), 491, 493.

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his epilogue with an injunction to his young readers: ‘every youth, every girl can

make the great historical change inside himself and herself: . . . to follow only the

leader who is a star of the new, natural noblesse’.70 Of course, the scheme of

European history presented in the body of Movements, provides historical material to

inspire Lawrence’s young readers to make such a ‘great historical change’ within

themselves. By suggesting that they will the return of a Caesarist leader, Lawrence

presents his readers with a choice very similar to that of Nietzsche’s thought of

eternal recurrence, which involves willing the return of that which has happened in

the past. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin notes, following Löwith, that ‘there is a

handwritten draft in which Caesar instead of Zarathustra is the bearer of Nietzsche’s

tidings’, and comments: ‘[t]hat is of no little moment. It underscores the fact that

Nietzsche had an inkling of his doctrine’s complicity with imperialism’.71 A very

similar complicity exists between the cyclical shape of history in Movements, and

Lawrence’s desire for the return of a strong leader, like those of Imperial Rome.

The pseudo-Nietzschean cyclical structure of Lawrence’s history complements its

apocalyptic shape. At first sight, it might seem that there is a tension within a history

that is both apocalyptic and cyclical. If the apocalypse if thought to bring an end to

history, is it not incompatible with the idea that history continues in a cyclical fashion,

by returning to its beginning? However, the tension is only apparent. As was seen

above, Lawrence understands apocalypse not as signalling an end to history, but

rather, in Joachite fashion, as giving rise to a new historical epoch. Such an epoch is

structurally very similar to that which is to be inaugurated by Nietzsche’s thought of

eternal recurrence. The thought of eternal recurrence aims to precipitate a new

70 Lawrence, Movements, 263, 266. 71 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 117; see Löwith, Eternal Recurrence, 72.

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historical age, as is made clear by a note from the Zarathustra period: ‘[f]rom the

moment when this thought begins to prevail . . . a new history will begin’.72 In ‘The

Vision and the Riddle’ of Zarathustra, this historical transition is signalled by play on

the word ‘Augenblick’. In this section, the gateway at which Zarathustra arrives is

called ‘Moment’ or ‘Augenblick’—literally ‘eye-glance’. As Gary Shapiro points out,

Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘Augenblick’ echoes Luther’s translation of St Paul’s

First Letter to the Corinithians (15:51-2): ‘[b]ehold, I tell you a secret: we shall not

sleep, but we shall be transformed; and suddenly, in the blink of an eye (Augenblick),

at the time of the last trumpet. For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be

raised incorruptible, and we shall be transformed’.73 Zarathustra’s historical

transformation is then an anti-Christian travesty of this eschatological moment: the

thought of eternal recurrence induces a historical rupture which is structurally similar

to the inauguration of a Millenarian reign. Indeed, Zarathustra talks of ‘the

Zarathustra empire of a thousand years’.74 The pseudo-Nietzschean cyclical form of

history in Movements similarly complements its Joachite epochal structure.

Correlatively, Lawrence’s ‘hero who can lead a great war’ takes on the aspect of a

Messianic leader, as well as a Nietzschean Übermensch.

Lawrence once again employed a cyclical scheme of history in his Apocalypse (1931).

The Book of Revelation provides, as T. R. Wright points out, a model for our whole

culture’s sense of an ending, an archetypal climax to the history of the world.75 Yet, in

his commentary on the Book of Revelation, Lawrence defied a linear conception of

72 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Eternal Recurrence’, in The Twilight of the Idols, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. Anthony Ludovic (Edinburgh; London: T. N. Foulds, 1911), 252. 73 Gary Shapiro, ‘Nietzsche’s Story of the Eye: Hyphenating the Augen-blick,’ Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 22 (2001), 17-35, 21-2. 74 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 193. 75 Wright, Bible, 228.

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history, and asserted in its place a cyclical scheme. He claimed that ‘[o]ur idea of time

as a continuity in an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The

pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer’.76 He went on to advance

a ‘piece of very old wisdom’, that he unambiguously declared ‘will always be true’:

[t]ime still moves in cycles, not in a straight line. And we are at the end of the Christian cycle. And the Logos, the good dragon of the beginning of the cycle is now the evil dragon of today.77

The contention that time ‘moves in cycles’ and ‘not in a straight line’ opposes the

orthodox interpretation of the Book of Revelation as signalling an end to history.

Rather than approaching the end of history, Lawrence suggests that we are merely at

the end of the Christian era, with the intimation that there will be another, post-

Christian epoch.

Lawrence finds support for his cyclical scheme of history in the Book of Revelation,

and in particular in the ‘great red dragon’, which first appears at Revelation 12:3, and

later returns in 20:2 as ‘the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil’, who is bound

for a thousand years. As part of his esoteric interpretation of the dragon, he advances

a myth, in which two dragons—a green and a red—appear at the beginning and end of

cycles of time:

[t]he agathodaimon becomes at last the kakodaimon. The green dragon becomes with time the red dragon. . . . What was a creative god, Ouranos, Kronos, becomes at the end of the time-period a destroyer and a devourer. The god of the beginning of an era is the evil principle at the end of that era. For time still moves in cycles. What was the green dragon, the good potency, at the beginning of the cycle has by the end gradually changed into the red dragon, the evil potency.78

76 D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 97. 77 Lawrence, Apocalypse, 125. 78 Lawrence, Apocalypse, 125.

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This myth is similar to those of the theosophists. Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret

Doctrine (1888), for instance, advances a cosmological scheme of great cycles of time

or yugas, of which we are living in the fifth, and holds that

[t]he Serpent became the type and symbol of evil, and of the Devil, only during the middle ages. The early Christians—besides the Ophite Gnostics—had their dual Logos: the Good and the Bad Serpent, the Agathodaemon and the Kakodaemon.79

However, while Lawrence’s cyclical cosmology is derived most immediately from

Madame Blavatsky and the theosophists, it is used to oppose Christian linear time in a

manner similar to Zarathustra’s doctrine of eternal return.

Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence is opposed to a linear, Christian scheme of

history. This is made clear in the section of Thus Spake Zarathustra entitled ‘The

Seven Seals’, which parodies the Book of Revelation. ‘The Seven Seals’ is written in

the form of a marriage song, with seven numbered verses, to match the seven seals of

the Book of Revelation. The reworking of Revelation is ironic, given that the refrain

of the song affirms eternal recurrence, which is antithetical to the orthodox

interpretation of the seals signalling the end of time and the end of the world. The

marriage of the song is not to be to ‘a woman’, but to the eternity of eternal

recurrence: ‘how then could I not lust for . . . the nuptial ring of rings—the ring of

recurrence!’.80 Nietzsche’s seals signal not the end to the world, but the end of the

Christian era. As Laurence Lampert puts it: ‘Nietzsche seals his book with seven seals

that mark the doom of the old order and the dawn of the new’.81 By overturning the

79 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, i (London: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1888), 410. Compare Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, i (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877), 133, 157-8. 80 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 184. 81 Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 287.

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Christian hinterworldly goal for mankind through the affirmation of eternal

recurrence, and by parodying the teaching of that goal in ‘The Seven Seals’,

Zarathustra creates a new meaning and future for the earth.

Like Zarathustra’s teaching, Lawrence’s theosophical myth in Apocalypse points

towards a new future for the earth. History will not end, but rather ‘the cycle goes

round’, and there will be ‘a return once more to the first . . . dragon’. This cyclical

cosmology conflicts with Revelation 20:10, at which the dragon is ‘cast into the lake

of fire and brimstone, . . . and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever’.

Lawrence’s subsumption of the Christian era into a greater, cyclical cosmology,

includes the imperative to overcome that era. For Lawrence, ‘[t]he good potency of

the beginning of the Christian era is now the evil potency of the end’, and so that era

must be overcome. The challenge is ‘to conquer the Logos, that the new dragon

gleaming green may lean down from among the stars and vivify us and make us

great’.82 The imperative is not to await the end of (linear) history, but to overcome the

present Christian era, and to induce a new cycle of time.

While Lawrence advanced various cyclical conceptions of history in his non-fictional

writing, we can now turn to his adaptations of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal

recurrence in his fiction. It will be seen that, in Women in Love, he drew on

Nietzsche’s thought as part of his critical portrayal of industrial capitalism.

Women in Love (1920) and ‘the problem of industrialism’

82 Lawrence, Apocalypse, 129, 125, 126.

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In Women in Love (1920), both Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen recoil from a life made

up of mechanical repetition. In the chapter ‘Sunday Evening’, Ursula broods on death,

which she thinks preferable to her life of mechanical repetition: ‘better die than live

mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions’. In ‘Snowed Up’, Gudrun is

driven almost to madness by the thought of ‘the mechanical succession of day

following day, day following day, ad infinitum’. 83 Both of their attitudes towards

mechanical repetition can be understood in the context of the new forms of temporal

experience that arose with modern forms of industrial labour, as analysed by Karl

Marx and E. P. Thompson.

In the first volume of Capital (1867), Karl Marx diagnosed repetition as a key aspect

of labour under the capitalist mode of production. He traced the historical emergence

of the uniform working-day as a combination of new modes of production, the

employment of machinery, and parliamentary legislation concerning working hours.

He points out that in the factory, the ‘dependence of the workman on the continuous

and uniform motion of the machinery . . . created the strictest disciple’. The various

Factory Acts contributed to this discipline. While they reduced the number of hours a

labourer could work each day, they also had the effect of increasing the intensity and

repetitiveness of labour: ‘the shortening of the working-day increases to a wonderful

degree the regularity, uniformity, order, continuity, and energy of . . . labour’.84 He

approvingly quotes James Kay’s description of labour in cotton manufacture: ‘the dull

routine of a ceaseless drudgery, in which the same mechanical process is incessantly

83 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 192, 464. 84 Karl Marx, Capital, ed. David McLellan, trans. Samuel Moore et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 253.

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repeated, resembles the torment of Sisyphus’.85 After Marx’s time, factory labour was

made yet more repetitive and mechanical by ‘Scientific Management’, pioneered by

Frederick Taylor, and implemented in Henry Ford’s car factories. Taylor’s ‘time and

motion studies’ sought to break down each of the tasks required by workers into their

most simple constituent movements, and to establish an exact duration for these

movements in order to increase efficiency.86 On Marx’s account, while the new time-

discipline of capitalism first emerged in the industries earliest revolutionised by

water-power, steam and machinery, it soon spread to many other branches of

production, including potteries and glass-making, which were ‘made to adopt the

factory system’, and finally even to ‘domestic industries’. In this last case, legislation

was needed to ‘declare any house in which work was done to be a factory’, as even

domestic labour had fallen ‘as completely under capitalist exploitation as the factories

themselves’.87

Ursula and Gudrun’s antipathetic attitudes towards mechanical repetition are in part

responses to the new forms of temporal experience that arose with industrial

capitalism. Marx charted the emergence of a new form of labour ‘not carried on by

fits and starts, but repeated day after day with unvarying uniformity’.88 Because

labour consists of the performance of repetitive tasks within the confines of a tightly

regulated working-day, each hour comes to seem indistinguishable from the others,

and is seemingly repeated endlessly within a well-defined pattern of the working-

85 James Phillips Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, 2nd edn (London: James Ridgway, 1832), 22; Marx, Capital, 261. Marx took the quotation from Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). 86 See E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38 (Dec., 1967), 56-97, 89. 87 Marx, Capital, 180. Compare Thompson, ‘Time’, 83. 88 Marx, Capital, 251.

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week that is itself endlessly repeated. Gudrun is horrified by such repetition, which

she thinks of as ‘the mechanical succession of day following day, day following

day’.89 Similarly, Ursula thinks of her life as a school teacher as one of repetitive,

mechanical routine. She thinks ahead to the next day: ‘[t]omorrow was Monday.

Monday, the beginning of another . . . school-week, mere routine and mechanical

activity’. 90 Her frequent use of the term ‘mechanical’ and its cognates is apt, given

the role that machinery played in formation of the new labour habits, and the creation

of the distinctive rhythm of the modern working-day. It suggests that her work as a

school teacher is characterized by the same repetitive routine that characterizes

factory work, and which Marx diagnosed as extending throughout all spheres of

production in industrial capitalism.

Not only was the school a place that was infused by the time-discipline of industrial

capitalism, but it was also an environment where such discipline and labour habits

were inculcated. E. P. Thompson draws attention to the exhortations to punctuality

and regularity that were written into the rules of schools, showing how such rules

prepared pupils for the work-discipline required by industry. ‘Once within the school

gates’, he comments, ‘the child entered the new universe of disciplined time’.91

Certainly, Ursula suffers from the ‘barren school-week’ that was ‘mere routine and

mechanical activity’, recognizing how her own life has been reduced to one of ‘sordid

routine and mechanical nullity’.92 Yet it should also be noted that she works in a

disciplined educational environment that prepares its students for mechanical and

repetitive jobs, and perpetuates the time-discipline of industrial capitalism. 89 Lawrence, Women, 464. She thinks of her life with Gerald as one of ‘hideous boring repetition’ (464). 90 Lawrence, Women, 193. 91 Thompson, ‘Time’, 84. 92 Lawrence, Women, 193.

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In ‘Snowed Up’, Gudrun’s horror of mechanical routine manifests itself in a

nightmarish series of images of clocks.93 Her fear of clocks, which she recognizes as

bordering on ‘madness’, can be placed within the context of the rigorous time-

discipline of industrial-capitalism. One symptom of the spread of capitalist time-

disciple was the manufacture and sale of domestic clocks. Thomson has drawn

attention to the ‘general diffusion of clocks and watches’ that occurred from the 1790s

onwards, when ‘the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of

labour’. He points out that, given the ready availability of inexpensive timepieces

from this time onwards, even cottagers typically owned clocks.94 Indeed, there is just

such a clock in Gudrun’s cottage. She has a perturbing experience with the ‘long-case

clock’ that stands in her parlour, watching for several minutes its ‘ruddy, round, slant-

eyed, joyous-painted face’ that seems to ogle her when the hands tick, until she breaks

down in a ‘maddened disgust’ that foreshadows her later visions of horrifying clocks

with twitching hands.95

In one of her visions in ‘Snowed Up’, Gudrun thinks, with Gerald and modern

industry in mind, that

[s]he could never escape. There she was, placed before the clock-face of life. And if she turned round, as in a railway station, to look at the book-stall, still she could see, with her very spine she could see the clock, always the great white clock-face. . . . the eternal, mechanical, monotonous clock-face of time.96

As Stevenson points out, it is appropriate that Gudrun thinks of herself standing in a

railway station in this chilling vision of a clock, given the role that railways played in

93 Lawrence, Women, 464-6. 94 Thompson, ‘Time’, 69. 95 Lawrence, Women, 376-7. 96 Lawrence, Women, 465.

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the standardization of a national British time in the nineteenth century.97 More simply,

railway clocks also played an important role in the regulation of the working-day. As

Marx points out in Capital, in order to circumscribe the working-day, one of the

stipulations made by the Factory Acts was that ‘“The time shall be regulated by a

public clock’, for example, the nearest railway clock, by which the factory clock is to

be set’. He points out that such ‘minutiæ’ were employed ‘with military uniformity’

to ‘regulate by stroke of the clock the times, limits, pauses of . . . work’.98 The role

that railway clocks played in the imposition of the time-discipline imposed by

industrial capitalism helps to illuminate Gudrun’s sense of being haunted in a railway

station by a ‘great white clock-face’.

Gudrun’s images of clocks convey the intrusive and pervasive nature of time in

industrial capitalism. She thinks of her head ticking ‘like a clock, with a very madness

of dead mechanical monotony and meaninglessness’. She realizes that Gerald will

provide her with no escape: ‘[h]e, his body, his motion, his life—it was the same

ticking, the same twitching across the dial, a horrible mechanical twitching forward

over the face of the hours’. Fittingly, given that Gerald is an industrial master, time

suffuses every aspect of his body, motion and life, until it seems that even ‘his kisses,

his embraces’, reverberate with the ‘tick-tack’ of time.99 With a hallucinatory

intensity that approaches madness, Gudrun thinks of her own face as a clock dial:

[d]idn’t her face really look like a clock dial—rather roundish, and often pale, and impassive. She would have got up to look, in the mirror, but the thought of the sight of her own face, that was like a twelve-hour clock-dial, filled her with such deep terror, that she hastened to think of something else.100

97 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 120-1. 98 Marx, Capital, 170. 99 Lawrence, Women, 464. 100 Lawrence, Women, 465.

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While the image frightens her, it is also strangely appropriate, given the imposition of

work-discipline under industrial capitalism. Marx suggests that it is a feature of

capitalism that labourers are effectively reduced to their labour-power, which can in

turn be measured in terms of labour time. It is thereby apt, he points out, that workers

should be designated as ‘full-timers’ or ‘half-timers’ depending on how much they

work: the ‘worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time’.101 Gudrun’s

picture of her face as a clock suggests a similar personification of time. It is as if her

own body were so thoroughly imbued with the time-discipline of industrial

capitalism, that it has been transformed into a clock.

Gudrun’s picture of her face as a clock is further apt, given the mechanizing effects of

the new labour habits demanded by industrial capitalism. As part of his analysis of the

effect of machines in modern industry, Marx draws attention to the phenomenon by

which labourers are turned into machines: ‘[m]achinery is put to a wrong use, with the

object of transforming the workman, from his very childhood, into a part of a detail-

machine’. Most evidently in the modern capitalist factory, the most ‘perfect form’ of

the exploitation of labour-power, people are subordinated to machines. The worker

here typically spends his entire life ‘serving one and the same machine’, and is taught

from a young age to ‘adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion

of an automaton’.102 The effects of modern labour are portrayed very similarly in

Women in Love. When Gerald decides to renovate his mining industry, and introduces

‘[n]ew machinery brought from America’, the miners are described as ‘reduced to

mere mechanical instruments’. Conforming closely to Marx’s analysis of the effects

101 Marx, Capital, 162, 153. 102 Marx, Capital, 258-60. Taylor’s time and motion studies later refined such a form of labour. Stevenson convincingly suggests that Gerald’s development of his mines in Women in Love reflects the ‘new attitude created by Taylorism and scientific management’ (Modernist Fiction, 117).

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of machinery in capitalist industry, the miners are described as being forced to submit

to work that ‘was terrible and heartbreaking in its mechanicalness’, and becoming

themselves ‘more and more mechanised’ in the process.103 Gudrun’s image of herself

as a clock involves a similar transformation into a machine. Earlier, she had compared

the miners at Beldover to machines, thinking that they sounded ‘like strange

machines, heavy, oiled’. Stirred to desire by these ‘half-automatised colliers’, she is

portrayed as a ‘new Daphne, turning not into a tree but a machine’.104 In this updated

version of the Greek myth, she fittingly metamorphoses into a machine, and thereby

becomes like the colliers whom she finds attractive and yet from whom she remains

distant.

It is not only the workers in Gerald’s mines that are transformed into machines by the

new conditions of labour. Gudrun thinks of ‘the Geralds of this world’ being turned

into ‘mechanisms’: ‘[l]et them become instruments, pure machines, pure wills that

work like clock-work, in perpetual repetition’.105 Her conceit suggests that industrial

masters are just as subject to the mechanizing effects of modern labour as their

workers. Her portrayal of them as working ‘like clock-work’ conveys the regular,

repetitive manner in which they operate, and intimates the time-discipline that they

have internalized and that they impose through their ‘wills’ on their workforces. That

they work in ‘perpetual repetition’ suggests, in part, that they work perpetually.106 On

Marx’s analysis, the use of machinery in production meant that the working-day could

in theory be lengthened until the point at which it seamlessly joined the next day, and

production could continue without interruption. He noted that, in the form of 103 Lawrence, Women, 230. 104 Lawrence, Women, 115-6. 105 Lawrence, Women, 466. 106 As we shall see below, ‘perpetual repetition’ also connotes Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence.

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machinery, the ‘implements of labour became automatic’, constituting an ‘industrial

perpetuum mobile, that would go on producing for ever’.107 Gudrun’s conceit is

similar to that of Marx, although for her, it is the industrial masters that become such

perpetually working machines.

Gudrun extends her conceit by compiling a mental list of the ‘machines’ in Gerald’s

firm, from the wheelbarrow with ‘one humble wheel’, to the miners with ‘a thousand

wheels’, up to Gerald ‘with a million wheels and cogs and axels’: ‘such a lot of little

wheels to his make-up! He was more intricate than a chronometer-watch’.108 The

depiction of Gerald as a complicated machine, made out of wheels, cogs and axels,

resonates with Marx’s description—which is open to both literal and figurative

interpretation—of the powerful ‘master’ of the factory as having his factory

machinery in his ‘brain [Hirn]’.109 Further, it is telling that Gudrun should compare

Gerald not just to a machine, but more specifically to an intricate ‘chronometer-

watch’. In his analysis of the effect of machinery in modern industry, Marx contends

that, by sweeping away ‘every moral and natural restriction on the length of the

working-day’, the machine became ‘the most unfailing means for placing every

moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist

for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital’.110 Gudrun’s comparison of

Gerald to a watch both reflects this way in which machines historically placed the

labourer’s time at the disposal of the capitalist, and intimates the power that Gerald

exerts over his work-force through time-discipline. In this latter case, it is fitting that

the comparison should be to a ‘chronometer-watch’, a highly precise and accurate

107 Marx, Capital, 247. 108 Lawrence, Women, 466. 109 Marx, Capital, 261. 110 Marx, Capital, 250.

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type of watch, that would be well-suited to the ‘scientific’ measurement and

regulation of tasks.111

More generally, the chronometer-watch stands a symbol of Gerald’s power. With the

rise of industrial capitalism, time became a site of conflict between the ruling and

working classes. Marx points out that the ‘creation of a normal working-day is . . . the

product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class

and the working class’.112 On the one hand, the industrial masters attempted to extract

as much labour time as possible from their work-force in order to increase labour

power and capital; on the other hand, the working class resisted this drive in part by

supporting legislation such as the Factory Acts that regulate and place limits on the

extent of the working-day. As Thompson makes clear, the working class came to

accept the new time categories of their employers, and ‘learned to fight back within

them’.113 Given this context, Gudrun’s comparison is revealing; the ‘chronometer-

watch’ stands as a symbol of time as a site of contestation between Gerald as an

industrial magnate and his workforce.

Both Ursula and Gudrun search—with limited success—for alternatives to lives made

up of mechanical repetition. In ‘Sunday Evening’, Ursula dwells on death, which she

sees as preferable to living a life of mechanical repetition. ‘How beautiful, how grand

and perfect death was, how good to look forward to’, she meditates, and finds

consolation in the fact that ‘this remained to look forward to, the pure inhuman

otherness of death’.114 Her turning towards death finds a philosophical counterpart in

111 Compare Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 119, 126-7. 112 Marx, Capital, 180. 113 Thompson, ‘Time’, 85-6. 114 Lawrence, Women, 193-4.

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the Zeitlichkeit of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Much as Ursula looks

forward to death as an edifying and elating eventuality that promises to bring purpose

to what was otherwise a ‘life of barren routine, without inner meaning, without inner

significance’, so too Heidegger counterposed the authentic stance of ‘anticipatory

resoluteness in the face of death’ to the inauthentic temporality of everyday life.115

Gudrun takes a different approach from her sister, and in a moment of desperation

thinks of escaping her life of mechanical repetition by fleeing with the artist Loerke,

to live a ‘Bohemian life’ in Dresden.116 By entertaining such a plan—and indeed by

enacting it after Gerald’s death—she settles on what Thompson identifies as ‘[o]ne

recurrent form of revolt within Western industrial capitalism’: the ‘bohemian or

beatnik’ practice of ‘flouting the urgency of respectable time-values’.117 The

Brangwen sisters’ attempts to escape a life of repetition through death or by means of

a bohemian lifestyle respectively differ markedly from Gerald’s approach, and his

Nietzschean affirmation of such a life.

Gerald Crich and Eternal Recurrence

Lawrence fictively adapted Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence in his portrayal

of Gerald Crich’s renovation of his mining industry.118 Unlike Ursula and Gudrun,

who recoil from mechanical repetition, Gerald comes to embrace such repetition as an

115 Heidegger, Being and Time, 378-9. This suggestion complements Michael Levenson’s identification of Heidegger’s Zeitlichkeit as a philosophical parallel that helps to ‘elucidate’ Virginia Woolf’s high modernist experiments with time (‘The Time-Mind of the Twenties’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 197-217, 212). 116 Lawrence, Women, 464. 117 Thompson, ‘Time’, 95. 118 Like Benjamin, Lawrence employed Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence to characterize the repetitive labour conditions of modern industrial capitalism. However, as we shall see, his interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought more closely resembles that of Heidegger than it does that of Benjamin.

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intensification of the conditions of modern labour. In the chapter ‘The Industrial

Magnate’, he throws himself into modernizing his family’s mining firm. He comes to

realize that

[t]here were two opposites, his will and the resistant Matter of the earth. And between these he could establish the very expression of his will, the incarnation of his power, a great and perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition, repetition ad infinitum, hence eternal and infinite. He found his eternal and his infinite in the pure machine-principle of perfect co-ordination into one pure, complex, infinitely repeated motion, like the spinning of a wheel; but a productive spinning, as the revolving of the universe may be called a productive spinning, a productive repetition through eternity, to infinity.119

Here, as Krockel points out, Lawrence unmistakably draws on Nietzsche’s notions of

eternal recurrence and will-to-power.120

Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence achieves a transformation of the traditional

understanding of ‘eternity’ as something that lies outside time, by rethinking it as the

infinite repetition or recurrence of events within time. Every event is supposed to

have occurred an infinite number of times in the past, and is seen as bound to be

repeated an infinite number of times in the future. Lawrence draws on Nietzsche’s

thought of eternal recurrence to portray Gerald’s mining industry as a ‘perfect

machine’, ‘system’ or ‘activity’ of ‘repetition ad infinitum, hence eternal and infinite’.

That Gerald’s system of infinite repetition should be ‘eternal’ suggests that, as with

Nietzsche’s doctrine, eternity is rethought in terms of infinite repetition within time.

Notably, Gerald is described as finding his ‘eternal and infinite’ in a ‘machine-

principle’ of ‘infinitely repeated motion’ that is compared to ‘the revolving of the

universe’ as ‘a productive spinning, a productive repetition through eternity, to

infinity’. This description of the revolving universe closely echoes some of 119 Lawrence, Women, 228. 120 Krockel, Germany, 170. Krockel comments that ‘the “eternal and infinite” mechanized repetition of Gerald’s will is an ideal—or perverse—form of Nietzsche’s “ewige Wiederkehr”’.

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Nietzsche’s more cosmological formulations of the doctrine of eternal universe, such

as that of the note collected in the Will to Power that describes the world ‘as a circular

movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game in

infinitum’.121 In both cases, the world or universe is portrayed in terms of a circular

movement of repetition through infinite time. What is distinctive about Lawrence’s

fictive adaptation of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence in Women in Love is

that he reimagines this doctrine in terms of machines and industry. The circular

movement of Nietzsche’s infinitely repeating world is transposed to a ‘machine-

principle’ likened to the spinning of a wheel, and the infinite repetition of Nietzsche’s

doctrine is re-construed as the endless ‘mechanical repetition’ of Gerald’s modern

industrial mining system.

Gerald’s affirmation of a mechanical-industrial version of Nietzsche’s eternal

recurrence is fused with the equally-Nietzschean motif of Wille zur Macht or ‘will-to-

power’. Gerald’s perfect mining machine is described as the ‘expression of his will,

the incarnation of his power’. As Krockel notes, Gerald here ‘expresses his “Wille zur

Macht” through his impact upon the outside world, to “reduce it to his will”’.122

Elsewhere, Ursula refers to Gerald’s forceful control over his horse beside a passing

train as a ‘lust for bullying—a real Wille zur Macht—so base, so petty’.123 In both

cases, Lawrence’s version of Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht is what Milton calls ‘a

conscious urge which aims at establishing dominance of an obvious, physical kind’.124

In the context of the renovation of his mines, Gerald’s affirmation of eternal

121 Nietzsche, Power, 549. For more cosmological formulations of the thought, see also ‘Eternal Recurrence’, 237-50. 122 Krockel, Germany, 170. 123 Lawrence, Women, 228, 150. 124 Milton, Lawrence, 15-6.

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recurrence is allied with the expression of his ‘will-to-power’, understood as a desire

to control and subjugate the earth and his workforce.

In Women in Love, Gudrun and Gerald adopt opposed stances towards the thought of

eternal recurrence. Gudrun’s recoil from the ‘thought of the mechanical succession of

day following day, day following day, ad infinitum’, is, as the repetition of the Latin

tag suggests, in part a reaction against Gerald’s affirmation of ‘repetition ad

infinitum’. Her horror at what she calls the ‘terrible bondage of [the] tick-tack of

time’ is a response appropriate both to the repetitive temporality of industrial

capitalism, and to Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence.125 In the first case, the

time-discipline of industrial capitalism is so pervasive and so deeply entrenched that

there is seemingly no escape. Just as the worker in capitalist society is made a slave to

the clock, so Gudrun sees the ‘tick-tack of time’ as a ‘terrible bondage’. However,

Gudrun’s response is also a particularly appropriate one to Nietzsche’s thought of

eternal recurrence. This thought presents itself, to those who are not able to affirm it,

as the ‘greatest weight’ and as most ‘abysmal thought’.126 If all things recur an infinite

number of times, then there can never be an escape from time. As a note in the Will to

Power puts it: ‘[e]verything becomes and returns eternally—escape is impossible!’127

Gudrun thinks of mechanical repetition in markedly similar terms, thinking of the

‘eternal repetition of hours and days’ as ‘too awful to contemplate’: ‘there was no

escape from it, no escape’.128

125 Lawrence, Women, 464. 126 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 274; Zarathustra, 125. 127 Nietzsche, Power, 545. 128 Lawrence, Women, 464.

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While Gudrun’s horror at the eternal repetition of hours and days corresponds to the

nihilistic aspect of the thought of eternal recurrence, Gerald’s embrace of mechanical

repetition ad infinitum is that of the Nietzschean Übermensch who is able to desire

and will the eternal recurrence of the same, and thereby joyfully to overcome

nihilism. This difference is marked by Gudrun’s embittered rejection of ‘the Geralds

of this world’: ‘[l]et them become instruments, pure machines, pure wills that work

like clock-work, in perpetual repetition’.129 While, as we have seen, Gudrun’s

sentiment reflects the mechanizing effects of modern labour in capitalist society, her

suggestion is also strongly Nietzschean. Her mention of ‘pure wills’ and ‘perpetual

repetition’ once again fuses the Nietzschean themes of will-to-power and eternal

recurrence. Her image of Gerald being as satisfied as ‘a wheelbarrow that goes

backwards and forwards along a plank all day’, captures the conditions of labour in

his mines as those of Nietzschean perpetual repetition. While this image suggests

perpetual repetition as a lateral motion—not unlike the swinging of a pendulum—her

image of Gerald composed of ‘a million wheels and cogs and axles’ conveys

perpetual repetition as an endless rotary motion, and thereby reflects well the cyclicity

of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence.

Gerald’s affirmation of eternal recurrence lies at the heart of a number of Nietzschean

themes that run through Women in Love. In ‘The Industrial Magnate’, Gerald’s

renovation of the mines at Beldover is portrayed in Nietzschean terms that are

projected schematically onto his relationship with his father. As Montgomery

remarks, the analysis of Christianity in Women in Love is indistinguishable from that

of Nietzsche. Lawrence presents the essential traits of the Christian in Gerald’s father,

129 Lawrence, Women, 466, my emphasis.

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the watchwords of whose life—pity, duty, and charity—are the very ideas that

Nietzsche singles out for his strongest attack.130 His father had tried, in the face of

increasing class-conflict, to balance his role as capitalist owner of the mines with

Christian principles, for example giving away hundreds of pounds of his own money

in charity to the workers when there was a strike. By contrast, Gerald dispenses

entirely with such Christian morality, rejecting ‘[t]he whole Christian attitude of love

and self-sacrifice’ as ‘old hat’.131 He dismisses his father’s qualms about exploiting

his workforce as superfluous sentiment, and instead focuses on ruthlessly exerting his

power to subordinate the miners to his will. The ‘great religion’ of his father becomes

‘obsolete’, and is ‘superseded in the world’.132

In modernizing his mining industry, Gerald is portrayed as a Nietzschean

Übermensch. For Nietzsche, he who affirms the thought of eternal recurrence

overcomes the merely human, and becomes the Übermensch or superman. For

instance, in Zarathustra’s parable in ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’, he who affirms

the thought of eternal recurrence arises ‘no longer human’.133 Similarly, Gerald,

having embraced a version of eternal recurrence as a machine-principle of infinite

repetition, appears as an industrial Übermensch. His new organization of the mines is

described in explicitly Nietzschean terms as ‘the highest that man had produced, the

most wonderful and superhuman’. His workers are ‘exalted by belonging to this great

and superhuman system which was beyond feeling or reason, something really

godlike’. Gerald himself transcends the merely human, and becomes ‘almost like a

130 Montgomery, Visionary, 126. 131 Lawrence, Women, 226-7. 132 Lawrence, Women, 229. 133 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 127.

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divinity’ or a god—a ‘God of the Machine, Deus ex Machina’.134 Gudrun later thinks

of him—again in Nietzschean terms—as ‘superhumanly strong’, and as a ‘pure,

inhuman, almost superhuman instrument’.135 It is as an industrial Nietzschean

Übermensch that he achieves a revaluation of his father’s Christian moral values,

reforming the mining industry according to values that lie beyond good and evil.

Within Women in Love, Gerald’s Nietzschean reformation of his mining firm plays an

important role within the wider scheme of history. The thought of eternal recurrence

is both a matter of individual temporality, and has a wider impact on history. On the

one hand, it involves the individual adopting a particular attitude within lived time, as

indicated allegorically in ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’ by the fact that the thought is

to be affirmed from a gateway with the word ‘Moment’ inscribed on top.136 Yet on

the other hand, the thought also induces a rupture in historical time, and induces the

birth of a new, post-Christian age. As one of Nietzsche’s notes from the Zarathustra

period puts it, ‘[t]he doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence is the turning point of

history’.137 Gerald’s embrace of a version of the thought of eternal recurrence in

Women in Love achieves a similar effect on history. In part, this impact is reflected

narrowly in terms of his family history, and of the history of the mines at Beldover.

His renovation of the mines is portrayed as making a complete break with the past,

and with his father’s management: ‘[h]is father was forgotten already. There was a

new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very

destructiveness’.138 Gerald’s recognition that ‘there was need for a complete break’

employs similar terms of rupture to those of Nietzsche, when he notes that the thought 134 Lawrence, Women, 231-2, 228, my emphasis. 135 Lawrence, Women, 402, 418. 136 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 125-6. 137 Nietzsche, ‘Eternal Recurrence’, 267; compare Power, 545. 138 Lawrence, Women, 231.

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of eternal recurrence ‘makes everything break open [Aufbrechen]’.139 Yet Gerald’s

industrial activities also promise—or threaten—to have a wider impact, on the stage

of national history.

Early in the novel, Gerald and Rupert discuss an article in the Daily Telegraph that

suggests that ‘there must arise a man who will give new values to things, give us new

truths, a new attitude to life’.140 As Montgomery points out, although unnamed,

‘Nietzsche is clearly present here’.141 The coming man of the article is a Nietzschean

Übermensch, who would revalue all values. It is not implausible that Gerald and

Rupert should find a Nietzschean article in a newspaper, given that Nietzsche enjoyed

a vogue in England during the early part of the twentieth century. Indeed, Patrick

Bridgwater argues that ‘Nietzsche began to receive serious recognition in England in

about 1902’, and draws attention to the many articles that were published on

Nietzsche in the British Press in the following decades, including in literary

magazines such as A. R. Orage’s The New Age, and in national newspapers such as

The Sunday Times.142 Gerald’s transformation into an industrial Übermensch means

that, before his untimely death in the Alps, he looks set to play the Nietzschean role

heralded by the newspaper. In ‘Snow’, Gudrun thinks of ‘the revolution that [Gerald]

had worked in the mines’, and, in a flight of ambition, envisages him effecting a

similar transformation on the national scale:

Gerald, with his force of will and his power for comprehending the actual world, should be set to solve the problems of the day, the problem of industrialism in the modern world. She knew he would, in the course of time, effect the changes he desired, he could re-organise the industrial system.143

139 Lawrence, Women, 224; Nietzsche, Power, 544, his emphasis. 140 Lawrence, Women, 54. 141 Montgomery, Visionary, 113. 142 Patrick Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony: A Study of Nietzsche’s Impact on English and American Literature (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972), 13. 143 Lawrence, Women, 417.

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For Gerald to solve ‘the problem of industrialism in the modern world’ through his

forceful ‘will’ and ‘power’—or will-to-power—would be for him to fulfil the

newspaper’s promise of a coming Nietzschean Übermensch. This role is—as one

would expect with the thought of eternal recurrence—one of explosive historical

significance, as suggested by the earlier images of England going off like a ‘powder-

magazine’ or a ‘display of fireworks’.144

While Gerald at one time promises to bring about a Nietzschean historical

‘revolution’, it should be noted that this is emphatically not a revolution in a Marxist

sense. It is not a revolution of the working class against their capitalist masters, which

promises to overthrow the existing class-structure and explode the capitalist form of

production. On the contrary, the ‘revolution’ that Gudrun recognizes Gerald as

already having effected in his mines, and which she hopes he will reproduce on the

national scale, is a politically conservative revolution, which serves to entrench the

power of the industrial masters over their workforces. Tellingly, in her plan for

Gerald’s industrial-political future, Gudrun thinks that ‘he would go into Parliament

in the Conservative interest’ in order to ‘clear up the great muddle of labour and

industry’.145

Notably, Lawrence’s unsympathetic adaptation of eternal recurrence and other

Nietzschean themes in Women in Love accords closely with Heidegger’s

interpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence as the virulent consummation of

144 Lawrence, Women, 395. In ‘Continental’, Gudrun is inspired by the Alpine setting to ‘feel übermenschlich—more than human’, and remarks that it would ‘be wonderful, if all England did suddenly go off like a display of fireworks’ (394-5). 145 Lawrence, Women, 417.

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modernity. Lawrence and Heidegger both arrived independently at an interpretation of

Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence in terms of industrial technology, despite

the fact that this connection is by no means self-evident.146 Both reinterpreted

Nietzsche’s thought in terms of machines. Heidegger asked provocatively: ‘[w]hat is

the essence of the modern power-driven machine [der modernen Kraftmaschine]

other than one expression of the eternal recurrence of the same?’147 Similarly,

Lawrence reinterpreted eternal recurrence as Gerald’s embrace of a ‘machine-

principle’ of ‘infinitely repeated motion’ that is compared to ‘the spinning of a

wheel’. Concordant patterns of imagery are developed throughout the novel, and

eternal recurrence is frequently associated with the circular motion of machine parts.

Gudrun’s thinking of Gerald as a machine made up of ‘a million wheels and cogs and

axles’ is one such example. Again, reworking a poem translated by Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow as ‘Retribution’, she thinks of Gerald with his mining firm as grinding on

‘at the old mills forever’; the image of endlessly turning ‘mill-stones’ in the ‘eternal

mills of God’ is an apt one for eternal recurrence. In this context, it is fitting that

Ursula, sickened by her existence of mechanical repetition, should think of ‘all life’ as

‘a rotary motion, mechanised’.148

Correlatively, Lawrence’s interpretations of Nietzsche’s notions of the Übermensch

and will-to-power in Women in Love resemble those of Heidegger.149 Lawrence’s

146 Löwith, for instance, dissented from Heidegger’s interpretation, claiming that the thought of eternal return cannot be ‘understood in terms of the essence of modern technology and its gyrating machines’ (European Nihilism, 120). He asks rhetorically: ‘when might Nietzsche ever have thought that the essence of modern technology, of the revolving engine, could be an “embodiment of the eternal recurrence of the same”?’ (Eternal Recurrence, 226). 147 Heidegger, Nietzsche, ii, 223, translation modified and emphasis removed. 148 Lawrence, Women, 228, 466, 463-4, 193. 149 Fernihough has similarly aligned Lawrence and Heidegger’s interpretations of Nietzsche, arguing that both ‘bring Nietzsche forward into the age of technology . . . whilst seeing him, curiously, as a kind of philosophical technologist himself’ (Aesthetics, 13). My reading complements her suggestion

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reinterpretation of the Übermensch as an industrial magnate accords with that of

Heidegger. Heidegger understands the Übermensch as he who affirms the thought of

eternal recurrence, and comes to interpret this Übermensch as the modern subject,

intent on the unbridled technological mastery and exploitation of the earth.150 For

such a subject, the ‘world changes into object’: ‘the earth . . . can show itself only as

an object of assault. . . . Nature appears everywhere . . . as the object of

technology’.151 In Women in Love, Gerald, as industrial Übermensch, conducts just

such an assault on his mines, using new technology and employing ‘instruments

human and metallic’ in his fight to subjugate ‘the resistant Matter of the

underground’.152

Milton has argued that Lawrence (deliberately) misrepresented Nietzsche’s notion of

will-to-power in Women in Love, and that Lawrence’s will-to-power as a form of

bullying stands as a crude variant of Nietzsche’s far more subtle concept.153 However,

setting aside the issue of fidelity to Nietzsche’s writings, it should be noted that

Lawrence’s version of will-to-power partially resembles that of Heidegger.154

Although he avoided a crudely psychological interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine,

Heidegger saw Nietzsche’s will-to-power as revealing itself in a consummate

subjectivity (the Übermensch), which sets itself against the world as object. He

portrayed the Übermensch as ‘unconditioned will to power’, who seeks to exhibit his

that ‘Gerald Crich seems to offer a supreme example of both Heidegger’s “technological man” and of the will-to-power’ (146). 150 Heidegger suggests that the doctrines of eternal recurrence and the Übermensch ‘are conjoined in a circle’ (Nietzsche, ii, 228). According to Heidegger, the Übermensch is he who is equal to the fundamental essence of modern technology, which he needs for ‘the institution of absolute dominion over the earth’ (iv, 117). 151 Heidegger, Technology, 100. 152 Lawrence, Women, 228. 153 Milton, Lawrence, 15-6. 154 Fernihough similarly aligns the way that Lawrence and Heidegger construe Nietzsche’s notion of will-to-power (Aesthetics, 147).

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power and achieve ‘absolute dominance over the earth’: he regards himself as ‘the

master of absolute administration of power with the fully developed power resources

of the earth’.155 In a manner that accords with Heidegger’s interpretation of the will-

to-power as the culmination of a metaphysical tradition in which man as subject is set

against the world as object, Gerald thinks of ‘mankind’ as ‘contradistinguished

against inanimate Matter’, and the history of mankind as the ‘history of the conquest

of the one by the other’. He seeks to achieve dominance over the earth: ‘it was his

will to subjugate Matter to his own ends. . . What he wanted was the pure fulfilment

of his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions. His will was now, to take

the coal out of the earth, profitably’.156 For both Lawrence and Heidegger, will-to-

power is understood in terms of the domination and subjugation of the earth.

Further parallels could be drawn between Women in Love and Heidegger’s writings

on technology.157 Heidegger’s analysis of Nietzsche forms part of his wider critique

of technology.158 In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger claimed that Nietzsche’s

thought of eternal recurrence comes to define modernity as a pernicious age of

unbridled technology. Later, in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), he

analysed the essence of technology as lying in ‘Enframing’ (Ge-stell), a mode of the

revelation of being that reduces the world to ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand) to be used

155 Heidegger, Nietzsche, iv, 81-2. 156 Lawrence, Women, 228, 223-4. 157 To do so is to build on a well-established tradition within Lawrence studies of reading Lawrence alongside Heidegger. See, in particular: Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Fernihough, Aesthetics; Fiona Becket, D. H. Lawrence: the Thinker as Poet (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1997); and Paul Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 87-120. 158 As Dale Allen Wilkerson remarks, Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche ‘explicitly [anticipate] his post-war stance concerning technology, the earth and the poetizing essence of Being’ (‘The Root of Heidegger’s Concern for the Earth at the Consummation of Metaphysics: The Nietzsche Lectures’, Cosmos and History, 1/1 (2005), 27-34, 28).

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for technological purposes. 159 In Women in Love, Gerald’s Nietzschean renovation of

his mines results in a phenomenon very similar to that which Heidegger calls

‘Enframing’. Indeed, Heidegger had used coal mining as an example of the

technological revelation of being, explaining how the earth is converted into standing-

reserve when it is ‘challenged into the putting out of coal and ore’.160 Elsewhere, he

wrote that by Enframing, nature is converted into a ‘gigantic gasoline station’.161

Similarly, Gerald comes to see the earth solely in terms of the raw materials that it

contains, and becomes obsessed with the question of ‘how to take the coal out of the

earth’. However, it is not just inert ‘Matter’ that he seeks to subjugate. He decides in a

ruthless and ‘inhuman’ manner to dispense with many of the firm’s employees, in

spite of his father’s appeals to charity and pity: ‘[t]he old grey managers, the old grey

clerks, the doddering old pensioners, he looked at them, and removed them as so

much lumber’.162 The term ‘lumber’ can mean both ‘surplus or disused articles’, or

‘timber or logs’; when heard in the second sense, the simile suggests that Gerald’s

employees are treated not as humans, but as natural resources that are there to be

exploited. It thereby suggests a phenomenon very similar to Heidegger’s notion of the

reduction to standing-reserve, particularly given that Heidegger took the term

‘standing-reserve’ from forestry, in which context it refers to forests that are viewed

simply in terms of their potential for timber. Again, in Women in Love, Gerald realises

that he can economise by refusing to provide the widows of men who have worked

for the firm with free coal, as has been custom, and wonders why these widows were

‘not immolated on the pyre of the husband, like the sati in India?’163 His conceit

159 Heidegger, Technology, 17, 19. 160 Heidegger, Technology, 14. Compare Fernihough, Aesthetics, 145. 161 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 50. 162 Lawrence, Women, 227, 224, 229. 163 Lawrence, Women, 230.

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functions by implicitly comparing the widows to the coal that he refuses to give them.

Once again, humans in Gerald’s industrial world are reduced to the status of natural

resources, fit to be used up and consumed.

It is worth dwelling briefly on the politics of the thought of eternal recurrence in

Women in Love. Lawrence drew on Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence to

imagine an intensification of the mechanical repetition that characterizes labour in

modern industrial capitalism. Marx provided an analysis of such repetition in the first

volume of Capital, and located an emancipatory revolutionary potential therein. He

observed that the extension of factory legislation to all trades had the effect of

enforcing ‘uniformity, regularity, order, and economy’ in each individual workshop.

Yet at the same time, by accelerating the concentration of capital and the exclusive

predominance of the factory system, it

matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one.164

Developing Marx’s recognition of a revolutionary potential within repetition,

Benjamin drew on Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence to theorize the

temporality of modernity as ‘the new as the ever-same’, a temporality which both

displays a hellish aspect, but also locates a politically emancipatory potential within

technology. By stark contrast, Gerald’s affirmation of eternal recurrence in Women in

Love holds no such emancipatory hope. Gerald’s new ‘machine-principle’ involves an

intensification of the conditions of modern labour as those of mechanical repetition,

and an ever-tighter exploitation of his workforce. Rather than promising to explode

164 Marx, Capital, 296.

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the capitalist form of production, Gerald metamorphoses into an arch-capitalist and

arch-industrialist.

Of course, the politics of eternal recurrence within the novel should be distinguished

from the politics of the novel, and from Lawrence’s personal politics. Gerald’s

embrace of eternal recurrence, and his industrial activities, are depicted negatively in

the novel. Lawrence’s picture of Gerald as a Nietzschean industrial magnate, brutally

exploiting his mines and his workforce, is by no means a sympathetic one. Indeed,

Lawrence drew on Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence in Women in Love to

create a critical portrayal of industrial modernity and of the technological exploitation

of the earth, much as Heidegger used Nietzsche’s philosophy in his critique of

technological modernity. However, as we shall see, Lawrence returned to Nietzsche’s

thought of eternal recurrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), where he reworked it

in a more sympathetic fashion.

2.2. The Revaluation of the Earth

It is widely held that D. H. Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928),

involves a flight from history. Critics such as Scott Sanders, Graham Holderness, and

Peter Scheckner have usefully situated the novel in the context of the 1926 General

Strike, and Lawrence’s reaction to the strike on returning to his home town of

Eastwood that year. However, drawing attention to the differences between the three

versions of the novel, all of these critics have maintained that the later versions

become progressively more divorced from history and from social realities.1 Sanders

contends that by the third version of the novel, Connie and Mellors have become ‘two

isolated souls who have severed all ties with the degraded world’ in order to ‘seek

their own private salvation through passion and flight’. As such, he argues that this

novel is typical of Lawrence, who, grieved by the crippling effects of

industrialization, was ‘driven again and again to flee history into a mythic realm in

which the passions of the body redeem the cruelties of the world’.2 Holderness

similarly argues that the novel underwent a ‘process of retreat from history’ through

its different versions, culminating in the final version, in which ‘“class” is abolished’:

‘[s]uch a denial of history is the necessary precondition for the relationship between

Connie and Mellors; history presents no obstacles to its fulfillment, its symbolic

reconciliation of real contradictions’.3 Scheckner concurs, suggesting that the ‘rich

tapestry of history, social struggle, and the interdependence of the public and private

sectors is greatly diminished’ over the course of the novels, and that by the final

1 For an account of the composition of the three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and a discussion 2 Scott Sanders, D. H. Lawrence: The World of the Five Major Novels (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 204-5. 3 Graham Holderness, D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1982), 223, 226.

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version, the ‘historical England of the first two versions now becomes largely two

people, Wragby woods, the hut, and a few animals’.4

While Sanders and Holderness argue that the novel’s turn from history was politically

retrograde, Scheckner advances a more politically salutary reading of this same

phenomenon. He holds that ‘even the least political version—the final one—suggests

that a retreat from history or society into a mythic realm of sex or blood

consciousness was an inadequate response to a political problem’.5 Drew Milne has

followed Scheckner’s lead, arguing that the novels do not partake in an ideological

retreat from class consciousness, but rather are ‘critical of sexual solutions to the

political problems represented in the novel’. They thereby supposedly serve a useful

political function, by allowing ‘us to see how the focus on sexual politics becomes

one way for individuals to take refuge from political contradictions in narratives of

personal conflict’.6

Contrary to these critics, I will in this chapter argue that, by recognizing its recourse

to Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence, we should appreciate that Lady

Chatterley’s Lover does not involve a retreat from history. Rather, it is a rich

novelistic imagination of a particular form of historical transition: the Nietzschean

overcoming of a Platonic historical age, which is at the same time the apocalyptic

inauguration of a third Joachite historical epoch. While the novel does represent a

narrower spectrum of society through its successive versions, its Nietzschean and

4 Scheckner, Class, 161. 5 Scheckner, Class, 13. 6 Drew Milne, ‘Lawrence and the Politics of Sexual Politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 197-216, 212-4.

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apocalyptic elements inversely become more pronounced.7 As we shall see,

acknowledging this historical scheme facilitates a revised understanding of the

novel’s politics, and of Lawrence’s green politics more generally.

It should be flagged that the following reading of the Lady Chatterley novels departs

from the Lukácsian theory of the novel held by Sanders, Holderness and Scheckner.

All of these critics subscribe to the view, derived from György Lukács, that the

novel’s political value arises from its success or failure at representing society—along

with its social contradictions—at a given moment in history.8 By contrast, my reading

is implicitly committed to a view of the novel derived from Paul Ricoeur’s theory of

time and narrative. As was seen above, Ricoeur holds that narrative configures time in

different ways (mimesis 2), and has the power to refigure its readers’ experience of

time, and in particular, their experience of historical time (mimesis 3).9 While the

Lady Chatterley novels arguably turn away from the realist ambition of representing

society along with its inherent social contradictions at a given historical moment, they

nevertheless imagine a particular shape of history, and dramatize a form of historical

transition. This configuration of a shape of history carries a politics, not least by its

potential to refigure its readers’ experience of time.

Lawrence’s adaptation of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence in Lady

Chatterley’s Lover differs markedly from his earlier engagements with that thought.

In Women in Love (1920) and Movements in European History (1921), he combined

7 On different grounds, Tony Pinkney has also dissented from the popular view that ‘the process of Lawrentian rewriting [in the Lady Chatterley novels] is a constant evacuation of history for myth’ (D. H. Lawrence and Modernism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 139-40). 8 See Sanders, Lawrence, 18, 32; Holderness, Lawrence, 7-12, 220; and Scheckner, Class, 93, 157. 9 While both theories are committed to some form of ‘representation’, Ricoeur’s neo-Aristotelian conception of representation, developed in his theory of three-fold mimesis, differs markedly from that of Lukács.

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versions of eternal recurrence with visions of powerful leadership. In Movements, he

drew from the cyclical shape of his history the need for a powerful Caesarist leader.

In Women in Love, he allied Gerald’s embrace of mechanical repetition with his

desire to exert his bullying ‘will-to-power’ over his mines and his work-force.

However, as we shall see, in the Lady Chatterley novels, eternal recurrence is no

longer associated with powerful leadership. This difference both reflects and takes

part in Lawrence’s well-documented movement away from authoritarian leadership

politics in the late 1920s.10 As he put it in a letter of 1928: ‘the leader of men is a back

number. After all, at the back of the hero is the militant ideal: and the militant ideal . .

. seems to me . . . a cold egg. We’re sort of sick of all forms of militarism’.11

Correspondingly, as we shall see, the thought of eternal recurrence stands in a very

different relationship to the environment in his last novel. Whereas in Women in Love,

the thought was associated with Gerald’s ruthless exploitation and despoliation of the

land through his industrial activities, Lawrence adapts the thought in far more

sympathetic fashion in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He makes it integral to Connie and

Mellors’s attempt, in the face of Clifford’s environmentally-damaging industrialism,

to revalue the earth.

The Historical Scheme of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)

For much of his life, Lawrence interpreted contemporary events with the help of

Nietzschean and apocalyptic schemes of history. For example, during the First World

War, he imagined a form of historical renewal by fusing elements of Nietzschean and 10 See, for instance, Rick Rylance’s account of the ‘softening of [Lawrence’s] political outlook in the face of militarist power’ (‘Lawrence’s Politics’, 172-3). 11 Letter to Witter Bynner, 13 March 1928; Letters, vi, 321. In context, Lawrence is explaining the transition of the vision of The Plumed Serpent to that of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘the new relationship will be some sort of tenderness . . . and not the . . . lead on and I follow, ich dien sort of business’.

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apocalyptic thought. In an often-quoted letter of 1915, he recorded his desire to ‘send

up the new shoots of a new era: a great, utter revolution, and the dawn of a new

historical epoch’. His sense that ‘an end is coming’, combined with his hope that there

will be a ‘new era’, is most immediately an apocalyptic brand of thought, and

conforms closely to the Joachite idea of the inauguration of a third historical age.12

Yet the phrase ‘the dawn of a new historical epoch’ also carries Nietzschean

overtones, echoing the title of one of Nietzsche’s works: Morgenröte, or The Dawn

(1881).13

Lawrence continued to hold out hope for historical renewal and a ‘revolution’ in the

last years of his life. He inveighed against what he saw as ‘the industrial system’,

whilst rejecting communism as a solution. For example, in a letter of 1928, he wrote

that ‘[i]t’s the industrial system which is wrong. And it’s up to the miners to change

it. Not by hating capitalism or anything else’.14 Again, in another letter of the same

year, he wrote that:

[i]t’s time there was an enormous revolution—not to instal soviets, but to give life itself a chance. What’s the good of an industrial system piling up rubbish, while nobody lives. . . . I get more revolutionary every minute, but for life’s sake. The dead materialism of Marx socialism and soviets seems to me no better than what we’ve got.15

Not only did he distinguish his preferred brand of historical ‘revolution’ to that of

‘Marx socialism and soviets’, he even diagnosed Marxism and the 1917 Russian

Revolution as the culmination of the industrial and machine-driven system against

which he was opposed. In his essay ‘Men Must Work and Women as Well’ (1929), he

12 Letter to Hugh Meredith, 2 November 1915; Letters, ii, 426. 13 Not long before, Lawrence had considered calling his new philosophical work ‘Morgenrot’, a title modelled on that of Nietzsche (see Letters, ii, 315, 317). 14 Letter to Charles Wilson, 15 January 1928; Letters, vi, 267. 15 Letter to Charles Wilson, 28 December 1928; The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 99.

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suggested that ‘the Soviet is established on the image of the machine’, and portrayed

the Russian Revolution as ‘a great outburst of anti-physical insanity’.16

The Lady Chatterley novels do not turn away from history. On the contrary, in these

novels, Lawrence used his favoured Nietzschean and apocalyptic schemes of history

to depict the overcoming of a historical age defined by Platonism, and to imagine the

birth of a new historical age, in which the earth and body are revalued.

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Constance Chatterley rebels against her husband’s

Platonism, and the pursuit of Platonic truth and beauty which had characterized the

early years of their marriage. For example, in the second version of the novel, Clifford

reads ‘Plato’s Phaedrus’ to Connie, but she ‘didn’t care about the progress of the

soul, nor for pure Truth nor pure Knowledge, nor the Philosophers’ heaven’. She

revolts against Clifford: ‘I am sick to death of your philosophy and your immortality!

It deadens everything out of existence. Look at you, how dead you are!’17

Commentators have pointed out that Connie, and the Lady Chatterley novels in

general, are anti-Platonist. Joseph Voelker draws attention to the anti-Platonism of the

three versions of the novel.18 Dennis Jackson highlights Connie’s ‘rebellion against

Platonism’, and her rejection of the Phaedrus myth.19 Barry Scherr usefully situates

the anti-Platonism of the novel within the wider context of Lawrence’s ‘quarrel with

16 D. H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 284. 17 D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 298-9. 18 Joseph C. Voelker, ‘The Spirit of No-Place: Elements of the Classical Ironic Utopia in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, Modern Fiction Studies, 25/2 (Summer 1979), 223-39, 226. 19 Dennis Jackson, ‘Literary Allusions in Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, in Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson (eds), D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady’: A New Look at ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 170-96, 174.

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Plato’, which dates from at least the time of the First World War.20 However, what

has not yet been recognized is that the anti-Platonism of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is

deeply Nietzschean.21 In particular, Connie’s rejection of Clifford’s Platonism closely

parallels Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence, through which Zarathustra sought

to break free of a historical age that has been defined by Platonism.

As Martin Heidegger points out, during the last years of his creative life, Nietzsche

laboured ‘at nothing else than the overturning of Platonism’.22 Nietzsche interpreted

the ‘collective history of Western philosophy’ as Platonism, understood as the belief

in the distinction between the true and apparent worlds, and saw this Platonism as

determinative of ‘the history of Western man’.23 Such an understanding is particularly

evident in the section of the Twilight of the Idols (1888) entitled ‘How the “True

World” Finally Became a Fable’. As Heidegger comments, the six numbered parts of

this section ‘can be readily recognized as the most important epochs of Western

thought’.24 Plato’s distinction between the true and apparent words re-emerges in the

Christian distinction between heaven and earth, Kant’s distinction between the

noumenal and phenomenal worlds, and Schopenhauer’s distinction between the world

as will and the world as representation. The sixth numbered part of this section marks

20 Barry J. Scherr, D. H. Lawrence’s Response to Plato: A Bloomian Interpretation (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 35. 21 For example, my reading challenges Eleanor H. Green’s contention that Nietzsche ‘fades out’ of Lawrence’s work after the leadership novels (‘Blueprints for Utopia: The Political Ideas of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 18/1 (1974), 141-61, 159). 22 Heidegger, Nietzsche, i, 154. In ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead”’, Heidegger contends that ‘Nietzsche understands his own philosophy as the countermovement to metaphysics, and that means for him a movement in opposition to Platonism’. Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s pronouncement ‘God is dead’ to mean that the Platonic suprasensory world (the heaven of the Phaedrus) ‘is without effective power’: ‘[m]etaphysics, i.e., for Nietzsche Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an end’ (61). 23 Heidegger, Nietzsche, ii, 171. 24 Heidegger, Nietzsche, i, 202.

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the juncture at which the opposition between the true and apparent worlds is to be

overcome:

[t]he true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? . . . But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one! . . . end of longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.25

The ‘end of [the] longest error’ marks the overcoming of Platonism as the history of

philosophy; the ‘high point of humanity’ signals the advent of the Übermensch who is

to supersede the ‘last man’. The overcoming of Platonism is to be achieved through

the thought of eternal recurrence, which, as Heidegger puts it, aims to overturn and

‘twist out of’ the Platonic antithesis between the true and false worlds: ‘INCIPIT

ZARATHUSTRA’.26

Following Nietzsche, Lawrence came to portray the history of the world as the history

of Platonism. In his late writings, he advanced grand historical narratives very similar

to those of Nietzsche. In Apocalypse (1931), he held that with the ‘coming of Socrates

. . . the cosmos died’, and the next ‘two thousand years’ constituted a Platonic-

Christian epoch characterised by the denial of the body and the triumph of the

machine.27 In his essay ‘Introduction to These Paintings’ (1929), he similarly

described the ‘history of our era’ as ‘the nauseating and repulsive history of the

crucifixion of the procreative body’, for which Plato was ‘arch-priest’. This Platonic

era is characterized by a denial of the body (‘We, dear reader, you and I, we were

born corpses and we are corpses’) and pernicious industrialism (‘the masses were

25 Nietzsche, Twilight, 171. 26 Heidegger, Nietzsche, i, 208. In a different (although closely related) idiom, the thought of eternal recurrence is employed to deconstruct the binary oppositions between the true and apparent worlds, being and becoming, and eternity and time—oppositions which have underpinned philosophy and metaphysics from Plato onwards, and which have lead to the devaluation of the body and of the earth. As we have seen, Heidegger ultimately suggested that the thought of eternal recurrence failed in its aim of overcoming Platonism, and instead stood as its virulent consummation. 27 Lawrence, Apocalypse, 96, 78, 198-9.

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caught and enslaved to industrialism . . . and our modern “civilisation” of money,

machines and wage-slaves was inaugurated’).28

In the Lady Chatterley novels, Connie overcomes Clifford’s Platonism in a manner

that closely parallels Zarathustra’s attempt to overcome Platonism through the

thought of eternal recurrence. In the first version of the novel, Clifford challenges

Connie, asking her whether ‘Plato’s ideas, and heaven, and those things, mean

nothing to you?’ She responds:

[p]ictures! They make pictures. . . . No! With heaven and Plato’s ideas and all those things, I feel as I do in the National Gallery, or in the Uffizi. I’m looking at something rather lovely, or very lovely, but the world is outside, and my life is in the world.29

By holding that Plato’s ideas and heaven ‘make pictures’, she implicitly dissents from

Socrates’ well-known view of art in the tenth book of Plato’s Republic. Therein,

Socrates holds painting to be ‘third removed from reality’, as the imitation of objects

which are made by craftsmen, and he and Glaucon famously resolve to banish

painters for their ideal republic.30 Inverting Socrates’ hierarchy, Connie degrades

Plato’s ideas and heaven to the level of pictures. Claiming that the ‘world is outside,

and my life is in the world’, she thereby values Plato’s ‘apparent world’ over his ‘true

world’. This inversion corresponds to the fifth stage of the history of philosophy in

Nietzsche’s ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable’, which consists of the

abolition of the ‘true world’, at which Plato blushes: ‘[t]he “true world”—an idea that

is of no further use . . . let’s get rid of it! . . . Plato blushes in shame’. Whereas the

‘true world’ in Nietzsche’s history becomes first ‘unattainable’, then an ‘obsolete,

28 Lawrence, Late Essays, 203, 193. 29 Lawrence, First and Second, 50. 30 Plato, Republic, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 605b, 348.

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superfluous idea’, so Connie feels distanced from Plato’s ideas and heaven: ‘I’m an

onlooker, I’m not in the picture’.31

As with Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence, Connie combats Platonism by

means of a new form of temporality.32 She rebels against Clifford’s obsession with a

Platonic immortality in which ‘your soul, or your self . . . has a life eternal’, feeling

that she had to ‘establish her own sort of immortality, perhaps; not always be

commandeered by his’.33 Her desire to establish ‘her own sort of immortality’

matches Zarathustra’s task in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra attains

a new type of immortality by willing the infinite repetition of each moment, and

thereby stamping becoming with the character of being through the thought of eternal

recurrence. This new sense of immortality is conveyed by one of Nietzsche’s notes

collected in the section ‘The Eternal Recurrence’, appended to Oscar Levy’s 1911

edition of The Twilight of The Idols, which counsels:

[l]et us stamp the impress of eternity upon our lives! This thought contains more than all the religions which taught us to contemn this life as a thing ephemeral, which bade us squint upwards to another and indefinite existence.34

Just as Nietzsche counsels us to ‘stamp the impress of eternity upon our lives’ through

the thought of eternal recurrence, so too Connie seeks a sense of immortality in this

life: ‘[i]f I don’t feel immortal, now, what’s the good of fussing about it later on?’ She

pursues her own sense of immortality through the moment, claiming, to Clifford’s

chagrin, that Miss Bentley blushing and looking ‘like a shy girl for a minute . . . 31 Nietzsche, Twilight, 171; Lawrence, First and Second, 50. 32 Adrian Del Caro points out that a ‘solid first step towards opposing or reversing the effects of Platonism’, which is to be achieved through the thought of the eternal recurrence, is ‘a reorientation toward time, such that time in its transient dimension is not used to cast aspersions on the passing nature of earthly life’ (Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 82). 33 Lawrence, First and Second, 49-50. A deleted passage in the autograph manuscript of the first version of the novel makes clear that ‘[t]his question of . . . immortality had been dinned in to her by Clifford, during their readings of Plato’ (622). 34 Nietzsche, ‘Eternal Recurrence’, 254.

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interests me as much as Plato’.35 Her finding immortality in a seemingly transitory

and ephemeral moment like Miss Bentley’s blushing, parallels Zarathustra’s stamping

the moment (the gateway ‘Moment’) with the character of eternity by wishing its

eternal recurrence.36 Much like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Connie achieves a

transformation of being through time, and discovers what she calls the ‘immortality of

the flesh’.37

Connie’s overcoming of Clifford’s Platonism constitutes a historical rupture. She

advances a historical grand narrative of the world as one of Platonism, which is

similar to those found elsewhere in Lawrence’s late writings:

[t]he human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life . . . And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body.38

This condensed grand narrative of the death of the body is akin to that of

‘Apocalypsis II’, in which Plato thrills at ‘the death of the body’, and the body

submits ‘unto death’ with Jesus.39 Similarly, Tommy Dukes, whom Frank Kermode

sees as Lawrence’s mouthpiece in the novel, prophesies the fall of ‘our civilisation’,

after which there will hopefully be a ‘resurrection of the body’, a phrase that resonates

with Connie.40 Her rejection of Clifford’s Platonism, and her pursuit of a

35 Lawrence, First and Second, 50. 36 In a note reproduced in ‘Explanatory Notes to Thus Spake Zarathustra’, appended to Levy’s edition of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche described the moment as being ‘properly occupied and immortalised’ through the thought of eternal recurrence (280). 37 Lawrence, First and Second, 50. 38 D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 234-5. Compare Will to Power, §1051, in which Nietzsche suggests that ‘the Greek body and the Greek soul “bloomed”’ with the Dionysian, and hopes that the Dionysian may one day triumph against Christianity, which has historically stood as its ‘counterdoctrine’ (541-2). 39 Lawrence, Apocalypse, 196-8. Lawrence’s view of the complicity between Platonism and Christianity in the denial of the body echoes that of Nietzsche. As Heidegger points out, for Nietzsche, Christianity forms one stage in the history of Platonism: ‘Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity has as its presupposition the interpretation of Christianity as a degenerate form of Platonism’ (Nietzsche, iii, 60). 40 Frank Kermode, Lawrence ([London]: Fontana, 1973), 127; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 75, 85.

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revivification of the body, marks the overcoming of the Platonic age. Her discovery of

the ‘immortality of the flesh’ inverts Platonism in a manner that parallels Nietzsche’s

thought of eternal recurrence, and achieves what Dukes calls a ‘resurrection of the

body’.

Connie’s overcoming of the Platonic age is apocalyptic as well as Nietzschean. As

Frank Kermode has shown, there is a ‘direct relation between the amorous action of

Lady Chatterley and Lawrence’s exposition of the Opening of the Seals’ in his

Apocalypse. Connie and Mellors undergo the pagan spiritual rebirth which Lawrence

thought to be symbolised by the opening of the seven seals.41 Connie is described as

reborn in a sexual encounter in the hut in the woods: ‘the consummation was upon

her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman’. This

sexual encounter, from which she emerges ‘a new-born thing’, recapitulates the entire

span of Biblical history, with echoes of the Genesis account of creation and the

Noachian flood: the ‘potent inexorable entry inside her’ came with a ‘primordial

tenderness, such as made the world in the beginning’, after which she let herself ‘be

gone in the flood’.42 Her orgasm—‘she was not, and she was born’—parallels

Lawrence’s account of the opening of the seventh seal of Revelation, which ‘is a

death and birth at once’.43 Connie’s spiritual rebirth signals not an end to history, but

the apocalyptic inauguration of a post-Christian epoch.

In ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, which advertises itself as a ‘glossary, or

prolegomena’ to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence situates the novel within a

41 Frank Kermode, Spenser and the Allegorists (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1962), 276; see also Lawrence, 128-9. 42 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 173-4. 43 Lawrence, Apocalypse, 105.

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tripartite scheme of history. He contends that there are three historical epochs: pre-

tragic, tragic, and post-tragic. Supposedly, we live at the end of the tragic epoch,

which has been marked by ‘escape from the body’, and whose main teachers include

Plato and Jesus.44 This tripartite scheme of history, with the promise of a not-yet-

realised third historical age, is classically Joachite, and in that respect is similar to the

historical scheme which Lawrence advanced in Movements in European History.

Connie’s apocalyptic rebirth in the novel can be seen as realising the Joachite hope

for a third age, or what Lawrence calls ‘the post-tragic epoch’.45 In the second version

of the novel, her rebirth is suggestively aligned with Joachim’s historical scheme.

Shortly before her departure for the continent, Clifford says to her: ‘[i]f only we were

an aeon or two ahead, you’d have no need to go out looking for a Holy Ghost on two

legs’.46 This mention of ‘a Holy Ghost on two legs’ is an allusion to Joachim’s ‘reign

of the Holy Ghost’, which in Movements is held to be a ‘reign which we have never

seen in the world, but which we must see’.47 The Nietzschean and apocalyptic aspects

of Connie’s sexual rebirth complement each other: her overcoming of the Platonic age

is at the same time both Nietzschean and Joachite.48 Lady Chatterley’s Lover thereby

fuses Nietzschean and apocalyptic shapes of history, in a manner similar to

Movements in European History.

The new historical age which Connie’s apocalyptic rebirth inaugurates is marked by

different articulations of time and space. The Platonic-industrial epoch, from which 44 Lawrence, ‘A Propos’, 329-31. The opening words of all three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover are: ‘Ours is essentially a tragic age’. 45 Lawrence, ‘A Propos’, 329. 46 Lawrence, First and Second, 465. 47 Lawrence, Movements, 147, 167. 48 For example, while it forms part of Lawrence’s tripartite Joachite scheme of history, the idea of a ‘tragic age’ is also Nietzschean. For instance, the first section of the Gay Science proclaims that: ‘[f]or the present, we still live in the age of tragedy, the age of moralities and religions’ (74). Similarly, a note in the Will to Power describes the historical age of nihilism, during which confidence in ‘the “true world”’ is lost, as ‘the tragic age’ (Will to Power, §37, 24).

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Connie’s rebirth makes a departure, is characterised by a technological configuration

of space and time. Clifford, as part of his activities as an industrial magnate, listens

obsessively to the radio which he has had installed at great expense: ‘[h]e could

sometimes get Madrid, or Frankfurt, even there in the uneasy Midlands’.49 In Lady

Chatterley’s Lover, the radio has altered the experience of time and space:

[t]he far ends of the earth are not five minutes from Charing Cross, nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends of the earth. Kings of Dahomey and Lamas of Thibet listen in to London and New York. . . . The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.50

These sentiments, presented through Connie’s free indirect discourse, mark a

particular configuration of time (the ‘far ends of the world are not five minutes from

Charing Cross’) and space (‘there are no far ends of the earth’). Connie’s observations

about the wireless correspond to what David Harvey calls the phenomenon of ‘time-

space compression’. Such a compression, which apparently characterises modernity,

is one by which ‘processes . . . so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and

time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent

the world to ourselves’. As an image of the ‘compression of our spatial and temporal

worlds’, Harvey gives the example of space appearing to shrink ‘to a “global village’

of telecommunications’.51 For Connie, these changes in time and space are far from a

cause of celebration, but reduce the world to a dangerous ‘vast and ghastly intricacy

of mechanism’.52

49 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 110. 50 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 281. 51 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 240, emphasis removed. 52 In Women in Love, Ursula has a similarly claustrophobic experience of space: ‘[e]verything was gone, walled in, with spikes on top of the walls, and one must ignominiously creep between the spiky walls through a labyrinth of life’ (193).

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Connie and Mellors’ ‘mystic marriage’ marks a reversion to an older form of

temporality—a return to what Lawrence calls ‘the rhythm of the cosmos’.53 In the

first version of the novel, the ‘world looked different’ to Connie after her rebirth:

[i]t had come alive. . . . She shivered to think of her other world, the . . . automatic world where she had lived with Clifford. To see the trees bulging and urging, like ships at anchor on a tide: to feel the world full of its own strange, ceaseless life!—she caught her breath, fearing to lose it again, fearing lest she might die down to the original machine-measured hours. Now, the clock mattered so little. The soft, full surge of the day had no minutes to it.54

She is born into a new epoch, marked by a new temporality, beyond the ‘machine-

measured hours’ of the ‘automatic world’ that she inhabited with Clifford. That ‘the

clock mattered so little’, and that the day ‘had no minutes to it’, suggests a new form

of time-reckoning, away from the demands of industrial modernity.

The transformation in time is matched by a transformation in space. In the second

version of the novel, Connie emerges into a world in which:

[t]ime was a full soft urge, with no minutes to it. And the universe ceased to be the vast clock-work of circling planets and pivotal suns . . . The stars opened like eyes, with a consciousness in them.55

As the celestial bodies are no longer reduced to measuring devices in this new form of

time without minutes, they cease to be a vast mechanical ‘clock-work’, and come to

life: they open ‘like eyes’. A new sense of space is signalled as Connie leaves

Mellors, ‘quietly slipping among the live presences of trees and hills and a far-off

star’.56 That her position in the woods is coordinated with ‘a far-off star’, as well as

with trees and hills, intimates a new and uncanny form of space. This new type of

space marks an apocalyptic renewal of the old, pagan experience of space. In his

introduction to Frederick Carter’s Dragon of the Apocalypse, Lawrence contrasted the 53 Lawrence, ‘A Propos’, 325, 328. 54 Lawrence, First and Second, 68. 55 Lawrence, First and Second, 382. 56 Lawrence, First and Second, 382.

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illimitable, homogenous space of modern astronomy, in which ‘lonely stars hang in

isolation’, with the older sense of the ‘living heavens’, that was first made available to

him by Carter’s interpretation of the Book of Revelation as an astrological scheme of

pagan symbols. After her rebirth, Connie is surrounded by what Lawrence portrays as

the pagan ‘living heavens’, with ‘brilliant living stars in live space’.57

The Environmental Politics of the Lady Chatterley Novels

The Lady Chatterley novels turn away from the authoritarian politics that characterize

Lawrence’s ‘leadership novels’ of the 1920s: Aaron’s Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923)

and The Plumed Serpent (1926). Given the arguably quasi-fascist, racist and

misogynistic elements of these novels, Lawrence’s movement to what he described as

the ‘tender’ vision of Lady Chatterley’s Lover has come as a relief to many

commentators. Raymond Williams, for instance, has described Lawrence’s last novel

as a ‘moving’ and ‘encouraging’ return to the concerns of his earlier fiction.58

Equally, however, as has been widely noted, the successive drafts of the Lady

Chatterley novels become increasingly unsympathetic to communism. In the first

version of the novel, the gamekeeper is what Holderness calls a ‘working-class hero’

who joins the Communist League, while in the third version, he explicitly rejects the

League, and argues that political action is an inadequate response to the social

paralysis of capitalism.59 This movement reflects Lawrence’s personal rejection of

57 Lawrence, Apocalypse, 46-7, 51, his emphasis. 58 Raymond Williams, The English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), 184. 59 Holderness, Lawrence, 223; Scheckner, Class, 147.

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what he called ‘[t]he dead materialism of Marx’, as a possible solution to the

problems that he witnessed when he returned to the Midlands in 1926.

While for those with Marxist sympathies, Lawrence’s spurning of communism is

regrettable, and arguably a betrayal of the miners and of the working class, it would

be a mistake to think that the Lady Chatterley novels turn away from politics

altogether. It is not the case, as Scheckner suggests, that in his last years, Lawrence

‘virtually abandoned politics’.60 Rather, he continued to draw on the same

Nietzschean and apocalyptic forms of historical thought that had served him so well

throughout his writing career, to sustain a vision of a green historical ‘revolution’ that

remains political, despite being incompatible with both fascism and communism.

The green revolution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover takes the form of a Nietzschean

revaluation of the earth. According to Nietzsche, Platonism entails a devaluation of

the earth. In the Will to Power, he traced the antithesis between the true and the

apparent worlds back to Plato, who, by attaching higher value to the nonsensuous,

brought about a ‘bold reversal’:

Plato measured the degree of reality by the degree of value and said: The more ‘Idea,’ the more being. He reversed the concept ‘reality’ and said: ‘What you take for real is an error, and the nearer we approach the ‘Idea,’ the nearer we approach ‘truth.’ . . . It was the greatest of rebaptisms; and because it has been adopted by Christianity we do not recognize how astonishing it is.61

For Nietzsche, once the world of being has been valued higher than that of becoming,

the latter is seen as a source of discontent, and is condemned: ‘[t]he apparent world is

60 Scheckner, Class, 115. 61 Nietzsche, Will to Power, §572, 308.

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not counted as a “valuable” world; appearance is supposed to constitute an objection

to supreme value’.62

Just as for Nietzsche, the invention of the ‘true world’ corresponds to a devaluation of

the world of becoming, so Clifford’s Platonism, and his valuation of a Platonic

immortality, devalues earthly life: ‘[l]ife was a thing he turned into a grisly

phantasm’.63 In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche proposes that ‘[i]t would not make

any sense to fabricate a world “other” than this one unless we had a powerful instinct

for libelling, belittling, and casting suspicion on life: in that case, we would be using

the phantasmagoria of an “other”, a “better” life to avenge ourselves on life’.64

Clifford’s obsession with Platonic immortality, which turns life into a ‘grisly

phantasm’, is just such an act of revenge on life. In the second version of the novel,

people like Clifford who want ‘immortality and eternity’ are portrayed through

Connie’s free indirect discourse as being ‘like a huge cold death-worm encircling the

earth, and letting nothing live. It was Will, the will of dead things to make everything

dead’.65 Such people exert what Nietzsche calls a ‘will to denial of life’: through their

desire for immortality and eternity, they exert their ‘unyielding, insistent human Will,

cold, anti-life, and insane’.66

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the effects of the Platonic devaluation of the body and of

the earth are clearly apparent. Under Clifford’s Platonist regime at Wragby, Connie’s

body suffers, and is reduced to a corpse-like state. In the first version of the novel, this

harm is conveyed in the terms of the Phaedrus myth: the ‘poor black horse of her 62 Nietzsche, Will to Power, §583, 313. 63 Lawrence, First and Second, 216. 64 Nietzsche, Twilight, 170, his emphasis. 65 Lawrence, First and Second, 300. 66 Nietzsche, Will to Power, §853, 452; Lawrence, First and Second, 301.

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body . . . had been lying now for months as if he were dead, with his neck twisted

sideways as if it had been broken’.67 In the third version of the novel, the same harm

is apparent in the scene in which she looks at herself naked in the mirror. She notices

that her body was ‘a little greyish and sapless’, her breasts ‘unripe’ and ‘a little bitter’,

her belly ‘slack’, and her thighs were going ‘flat, slack, meaningless’. The sight of her

withering body makes her depressed and miserable, and causes her to hate ‘[t]he

mental life’.68 The violence done to Connie’s body is symptomatic of what Lawrence

in ‘Introduction to These Paintings’ calls the ‘nauseating and repulsive history of the

crucifixion of the procreative body’, for which Plato was arch-priest.69

Clifford’s Platonist regime similarly drains all value from the earth. Wragby is

described as ‘spectral, not really existing’, just as for Plato, the world perceived by the

senses is one of non-being. In markedly Platonic terms, Connie thinks of Wragby as

like the ‘simulacrum of reality’.70 The Platonic devaluation of the earth is made

particularly apparent in a scene in which Clifford attempts to ascend a hill in his

mechanical chair. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates advances a myth in which he likens

the soul ‘to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer’, and

describes the ‘steep climb’ of such souls ‘to the high tier at the rim of heaven’.71

Clifford’s efforts to climb the hill in his motor-chair parodies this Platonic ascent to

heaven: he fails, and has to be rescued by the gamekeeper. Significantly, this parody

intimates the harm that his Platonism inflicts on the environment.

67 Lawrence, First and Second, 27. 68 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 70-1. 69 Lawrence, Late Essays, 203. In ‘A Propos’, Lawrence similarly contended that ‘the great crusade against sex and the body started in full blast, with Plato’ (332). 70 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 18. 71 Plato, Phaedrus, in Complete Works, 246a, 247b, 524-5.

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In ‘Apocalypsis II’, Lawrence advanced a grand historical narrative of the

technological domination of the earth. Supposedly, history since Plato has been ‘one

long process’: the ‘triumph of Mind over the cosmos progresses in small spasms:

aeroplanes, radio, motor-traffic’.72 While Lawrence here associates the triumph of

Platonism with the development of technology, appropriately, in Lady Chatterley’s

Lover, Clifford makes his Platonic ascent in a motorised wheelchair. Connie re-

imagines Plato’s conceit by replacing the horses with a Ford car, or, as Clifford would

have it, a more aristocratic Rolls-Royce: ‘Plato never thought we’d go one better than

his black steed and his white steed, and have no steeds at all, only an engine!’73

Connie and Clifford’s conceit suggests a complicity between Platonism and

technology that neatly complements Lawrence’s historical scheme in ‘Apocalypsis

II’. Connie watches Clifford’s bath-chair ‘jolt over the wood-ruff and the bugle’,

‘squash the little yellow cups of the creeping jenny’, and make a ‘wake through the

forget-me-nots’.74 His crushing the flowers on his ascent ironically conveys the

damage done by his Platonic devaluation of the earth. Clifford, sitting impotently

amid the wrecked flowers at the bottom of the hill, is emblematic of what in

‘Apocalypsis II’ are described as the ‘men of mind and spirit’ who ‘only succeed in

spoiling the earth’.75

The parody of the Phaedrus myth reflects the real environmental damage brought

about by Clifford’s industrial activities. This damage becomes particularly apparent to

Connie on being driven past the colliery at Stacks Gate, where she sees the ‘huge new

installations’ that Clifford has built. These new installations harm the environment:

72 Lawrence, Apocalypse, 198-9. 73 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 179. 74 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 184. 75 Lawrence, Apocalypse, 200.

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‘vast plumes of smoke and vapour rose from the new works’; in the adjacent town,

‘iron clanked with a huge reverberating clank, and huge lorries shook the earth, and

whistles screamed’.76 Returning to this part of the world from the continent in the

second version of the novel, Connie finds a ‘realm of twilight and the mystery of iron,

this disemboweled earth of coal and steel and steam, and the glare of red fire and of

shadow’.77 The metaphor of the disemboweled earth, by figuring the earth as a body,

neatly links the harm sustained to both the body and to the earth by Platonism. In this

version of the novel, Clifford’s intensification of his mining activities is accompanied

by a blunt determination to make a mark in an act of industrial vengeance on the

world: ‘[h]e still was going to make his mark on the environment: even if the mark

should only be a scar!’78

Clifford’s industrial activities at Stacks Gate obtrude on the woods, which would

otherwise have been a perfect pastoral haven.79 From Wragby Hall can be heard ‘the

rattle-rattle of the screens at the pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clink of

shunting trucks and the hoarse little whistle of the colliery locomotives’. As a result of

the burning of Tevershall pit bank, the house was ‘full of the stench of [the]

sulphureous combustion of the earth’s excrement’. Mellors, returning from an

assignation with Connie, tries to escape into the ‘darkness and seclusion of the wood’,

but

knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. . . . The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and

76 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 154-5. 77 Lawrence, First and Second, 514. 78 Lawrence, First and Second, 347. 79 On pastoral, see Michael Squires, ‘Pastoral Patterns and Pastoral Variants in Lady Chatterley's Lover’, ELH, 39/1 (March 1972), 129-46, and Kingsley Widmer, ‘The Pertinence of Modern Pastoral: The Three Versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover’, Studies in the Novel, 5/3 (Fall 1973), 298-313.

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mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron.80

Connie similarly resents the intrusion of industry in what would otherwise be her

perfect pastoral idyll. Staying at Mellors’ cottage in the woods, whilst outside is ‘a

clear clean morning’, she wishes: ‘[i]f only there weren’t the other ghastly world of

smoke and iron!’81

It is a recurrent motif in criticism on Lady Chatterley’s Lover that the novel stages the

opposition between industrial and anti-industrial forms of life, pursued by Clifford on

the one hand, and Connie and Mellors on the other.82 What has yet to be recognized,

however, is the Nietzschean nature of Connie and Mellors’s opposition to Clifford’s

industrial form of life. Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence, by collapsing the

Platonic antithesis between the true and apparent worlds, opens the way for a

revaluation of values. For Nietzsche, the antithesis between the true and apparent

worlds constitutes the ‘[p]rejudice of prejudices’, and must be overcome:

[i]t is of cardinal importance that one should abolish the true world. It is the great inspirer of doubt and devaluator in respect of the world we are: it has been our most dangerous attempt yet to assassinate life. War on all presuppositions on the basis of which one has invented a true world.83

The antithesis is to be overcome through the thought of eternal recurrence: what had

been devalued as the apparent world of becoming, stands to be affirmed and revalued.

As Heidegger puts it, with ‘the abolition of Platonism the way first opens for the

80 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 13, 119. 81 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 212. 82 See, for example, Julian Moynahan, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover: The Deed of Life’, ELH, 26/1 (March 1959), 66-90, 66-7; Widmer, ‘Pastoral’, 304-5; and Jae-Kyung Koh, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s World Vision of Cultural Regeneration in Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, Midwest Quarterly, 43/2 (2002), 189-206, 201. 83 Nietzsche, Will to Power, §583, 313-4, his emphasis.

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affirmation of the sensuous [world]’.84 The revaluation of all values is dramatised by

Zarathustra, the thinker of the thought of eternal recurrence. It is he, in his extreme

iconoclasm, ‘who breaks tablets and old values’: he sits with ‘old broken tablets

around [him] and also new tablets only partially written upon’.85

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie rebels against Clifford’s deleterious Platonism,

and seeks a Nietzschean revaluation of the body and earth. Whereas in Women in

Love, Gerald’s revaluation of values had taken the form of a newly-intensified mining

system that exploited his workers and the environment, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover,

Connie’s revaluation of values is imagined as a site of opposition to an industrial form

of life. In the second version of the novel, her discovery of the aptly-named

‘immortality of the flesh’ precipitates a revaluation of her previously-neglected body.

Her body is brought to life by Parkin’s rapturous affirmation: ‘for the first time in her

life she had felt the animate beauty of her own thighs and belly and hips’.86 Her

revaluation of the body is like that of Zarathustra. Zarathustra declares that he will not

go the way of the ‘despisers of the body’ who ‘are angry now at life and earth’. In ‘On

the Hinterworldly’, he holds that it was ‘the sick and the dying-out who despised the

body and the earth. . . . [T]hey fancied themselves detached from this earth, these

ingrates’. By contrast, Zarathustra values ‘the healthy body, the perfect and

perpendicular body’, for ‘it speaks of the meaning of the earth’.87

84 Heidegger, Nietzsche, i, 209. 85 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 171, 156. 86 Lawrence, First and Second, 336. Characteristically fusing Nietzschean and apocalyptic themes, the coming to life of Connie’s body over the course of the novel corresponds both to a Nietzschean revaluation of the body, and to an apocalyptic rebirth, as understood by Lawrence in Apocalypse. 87 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 21-4.

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The revivification of Connie’s body is accompanied by a revaluation of the earth.

Nietzsche remarks in a note on the thought of eternal recurrence: ‘[f]rom the moment

when this thought begins to prevail all colours will change their hue’.88 That is, with

the collapse of the Platonic antithesis between real and apparent worlds, colour

returns to what had been the previously dim and shadowy ‘apparent world’. A similar

transformation occurs in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Under Clifford’s Platonist regime,

Wragby Hall had been rendered ‘spectral’, and Connie picked ‘primroses that were

only shadows’.89 Driving around Tevershall, she finds the populace ‘disfigured,

strange, almost wraith-like’: to her, ‘there was something grey and spectral about

them’.90 However, once she has broken with Clifford’s Platonism, the previously

murky world becomes suffused with colour. On entering the woods, she notices that

‘[i]n the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark, as if they had unclothed

themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to burn with greenness’. Similarly,

in a subsequently deleted passage from the typescript of the third version of the novel,

her sexual act of the recreation of the world is accompanied by ‘a flushing like the

birth of colour, strange and suffused’. It was ‘the sensual birth of the loveliness of

colour. Then the brightness came in gushes, gushes of dawn that flashed brilliant at

the edges’.91

Connie consciously pursues a project of revaluing the earth. In the second version of

the novel, in response to the deadening effects of the ‘anti-life’ Platonist concern for

immortality and eternity, she wishes for the revivification of the earth:

88 Nietzsche, ‘Eternal Recurrence’, 252. 89 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 18. 90 Lawrence, First and Second, 514, 369. The spectrality of Wragby parallels what Lawrence, in ‘Introduction to these Paintings’, diagnoses as one effect of Platonism: ‘[a]ll we know is shadows . . . Shadows of everything, of the whole world, shadows even of ourselves. . . . [O]ur world is a wide tomb full of ghosts, replicas. We are all spectres’ (Late Essays, 203). 91 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 122, 419.

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[t]he body of men, and the animals, and the earth!—it could all come alive again. . . . there was to be a resurrection, the earth, the animals, and men. She didn’t want any more dead things . . . No more engines, no more machines . . . She wanted live things, only live things: grass and trees on the earth, and flowers that looked after themselves; and birds and animals, stoats and rabbits, hawks and linnets, deer and wolves, lambs and foxes. There must be life again on earth.92

Her hope for a ‘resurrection’ most immediately conforms to Tommy Dukes’ prophecy

of a ‘resurrection of the body’.93 Moreover, her enumeration of different animals

echoes the prophecy of Isaiah 11, in which the ‘wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the kid’.94 Juxtaposing predator with prey,

Connie’s thought echoes the rhetoric of Isaiah; her hope for a new earth thereby takes

a Biblical prophetic form, and suggests the possibility of a Millennial resurrection.

However, her desire for a new earth is also Nietzschean, and echoes Zarathustra’s

rhetoric of earth, which has been given ecological interpretations by Adrian Del Caro

and others.95 Zarathustra beseeches his brothers to ‘remain faithful to the earth and

[not to] believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! . . . to desecrate the

earth is the most terrible thing’.96 He exhorts his brothers not to let their virtue

fly away from earthly things and beat against eternal walls with its wings! . . . Like me, guide the virtue that has flown away back to the earth—yes, back to the body and life.97

By not flying away from earthly things, the ‘value of all things will be posited newly

by you!’ Connie’s hope for there to be ‘life again on earth’ parallels Zarathustra’s

message of optimism: ‘the earth shall yet become a site of recovery! And already a

new fragrance lies about it, salubrious—and a new hope!’98

92 Lawrence, First and Second, 300. 93 Lawrence, First and Second, 282. 94 Isaiah 11:6-10. 95 Del Caro, Rhetoric of Earth. On ecological approaches to Nietzsche, see below. 96 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 6, my emphasis. 97 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 57. 98 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 58.

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Assessing Lawrence’s Green Politics

It is a central claim of these chapters that the issue of Lawrence’s environmental

politics can be addressed through the politics of time, and more specifically, through

the uses that he made of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. In this concluding

section, I would like to use Lawrence’s adaptations of the thought of eternal

recurrence to position his work in relation to recent ecotheory and ecocriticism, and to

assess the politics of his environmental writing.

It is notable how differently Lawrence employed Nietzsche’s thought of eternal

recurrence over the course of his writing. In Movements in European History, he

adopted a pseudo-Nietzschean cyclical scheme of history to suggest the need for an

authoritarian political leader to unify Europe; in Women in Love, he used Nietzsche’s

thought to portray Gerald’s industrial exploitation of the earth through a principle of

mechanical repetition; and in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he drew on the thought to

imagine Connie’s rebellion against Clifford, and her revaluation of the earth and

body. In the last two cases, Lawrence drew on the thought of eternal recurrence as a

central aspect of his portrayal of industrialism and environmental damage, yet he

deployed the thought in almost diametrically opposed ways. In Women in Love, the

thought becomes the acme of Gerald’s industrial exploitation, whereas in Lady

Chatterley’s Lover, it becomes a site of Connie’s resistance to industrial spoliation.

How are we to make sense of this change? Are we to see it as a reflection of

Lawrence’s inconsistency as a thinker? While he was a persistent critic of what he

called ‘the industrial system’, do his divergent uses of Nietzsche’s thought betray him

as a philosophical dilettante? On the contrary, I suggest that this divergence reflects

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an openness of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence to opposed interpretations,

and mirrors an ongoing controversy concerning the interpretation of that thought.

It is controversial whether Nietzsche can be considered a ‘green’ thinker. The most

emphatic rejection of this possibility came from Heidegger, who, as we have seen,

held that Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence stands as the virulent

consummation of the metaphysical tradition, and paves the way for the ruthless

exploitation and technological mastery of the earth in the age of modernity. More

recently, Ralph Acampora and Michael Zimmerman have adopted similar positions.99

By contrast, critics such as Max Hallman, Graham Parkes, John McGraw and Adrian

Del Caro have reappraised Nietzsche, and championed him as a proto-ecological

thinker.100

Lawrence’s contrasting adaptations of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence

mirror these more recent divergent interpretations of that thought. His portrayal of

Gerald as industrial magnate in Women in Love complements Heidegger’s hostile

interpretation of eternal recurrence as laying open the earth for technological mastery,

whereas his sympathetic portrayal of Connie’s Nietzschean overcoming of Clifford’s

Platonism in Lady Chatterley’s Lover anticipates recent proto-ecological readings of

Nietzsche. In the latter case, Connie’s rejection of Clifford’s Platonism has much in

common, for example, with McGraw’s interpretation of Nietzsche as a proto- 99 Ralph R. Acampora, ‘Using and Abusing Nietzsche for Environmental Ethics’, Environmental Ethics, 16/2 (Summer 1994), 187-94; Michael Zimmerman, ‘Nietzsche and Ecology: A Critical Inquiry’, in Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg (eds), Reading Nietzsche at the Margins (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008), 165-86. 100 Max O. Hallman, ‘Nietzsche’s Environmental Ethics’, Environmental Ethics, 13/2 (Summer 1991), 99-126; Graham Parkes, ‘Staying Loyal to the Earth: Nietzsche as an Ecological Thinker’, in John Lippitt (ed.), Nietzsche’s Futures (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1999), 167-88; John G. McGraw, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche: Earth-Enthusiast Extraordinaire’, Analecta Husserliana, 59 (1999), 277-306; Adrian Del Caro, ‘Nietzschean Considerations on Environment’, Environmental Ethics, 26/3 (Fall 2004), 307-21, and Rhetoric of Earth.

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ecological thinker. Against Plato and the history of philosophy more generally, which

have ‘paved the way’ for the ‘pillaging’ and the ‘poisoning’ of the planet, McGraw

champions Zarathustra as the incarnation of Nietzsche’s ‘earthism qua life-

philosophy’, and interprets the doctrine of eternal recurrence to be ‘paradigmatically

emblematic of the ecological concern for the preservation/conservation of the earth’s

diverse resources’.101

Lawrence’s recourse to Nietzsche helps to explain his partial affinity with the later

deep ecology movement. His writings, with their critique of anthropocentrism, their

valourization of the inhuman, and their exploration of nonhuman perspectives, have

often been identified and celebrated as forerunners of deep ecology.102 One strand of

Lawrence’s writing that resonates with the more extreme end of deep ecology, is the

recognition of the harm that humanity has inflicted on the planet, and the various

misanthropic fantasies of a world without humans.103 Both Birkin and Mellors indulge

in such fantasies. Birkin, for instance, remarks that ‘we cover the earth with foulness’,

and argues that ‘Man is a mistake, he must go’. He wishes for ‘man’ to be ‘swept off

the face of the earth’, to allow ‘a new start, non-human’: ‘don’t you find it a beautiful

clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting

up?’104 Similarly, Mellors expresses his feeling that ‘the human world’ has ‘doomed

itself’, and that ‘nowhere’s far enough away to get away’: ‘[t]he moon wouldn't be far

enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly,

unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men’. Had he the power, he would ‘wipe

the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, 101 McGraw, ‘Earth-Enthusiast’, 277-9. 102 See Garrard, Ecocriticism, 97, 100-1, and ‘Nietzsche contra Lawrence’, 21. 103 As Garrard points out, one ‘major, recurrent objection to deep ecology is that ecocentrism is misanthropic’ (Ecocriticism, 25). 104 Lawrence, Women, 55, 127-8.

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like a black mistake’.105 As Garrard observes, it is the ‘biocentric inhumanism’ of

such visions that ‘seems to appeal to deep ecologists’.106

Nietzsche’s philosophy stands as a common source of inspiration for the anti-

anthropomorphism of both Lawrence and deep ecology. While, as Anna Bramwell

points out, Lawrence’s ‘intellectual background was saturated with a mixture of

nature-worship and anti-anthropomorphism’, Nietzsche’s treatment of

anthropomorphism demands particularly close attention.107 The thought of eternal

recurrence is, arguably, a radically anti-anthropomorphic thought.108 In a note in the

Will to Power, Nietzsche remarked that human values are ‘constructs of domination’

that have been ‘falsely projected into the essence of things’. A revaluation of all

values would involve the dehumanization of the world; it would break with

humanism, understood as ‘the hyperbolic naiveté of man: positing himself as the

meaning and measure of the value of things’.109 In Women in Love, the issue of

anthropomorphism is discussed by Lawrence’s characters in terms very similar to

those of Nietzsche. Ursula explicitly objects to anthropomorphism: ‘[h]ow stupid

anthropomorphism is! Gudrun is really impudent, insolent, making herself the

measure of everything, making everything come down to human standards. Rupert is

quite right, human beings are boring, painting the universe with their own image. The

universe is non-human’.110

105 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 220. 106 Garrard, Ecocriticism, 101. 107 Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 112. 108 Heidegger disagrees, arguing that the thought of eternal recurrence failed in its aim of dehumanization. Instead, it supposedly involves an ‘unconditioned anthropomorphism’, which leads to a revaluation of values as ‘an unconditioned dominion over the earth by human beings’ (Nietzsche, iii, 173-4, emphasis removed). 109 Nietzsche, Will to Power, §12, 14, emphasis removed. 110 Lawrence, Women, 264.

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Nietzsche has also inspired deep ecologists. As Garrard informs us, one of the

defining features of ‘deep ecology’ is its demand for a fundamental ‘shift from a

human-centred to a nature-centred system of values’.111 The thought of eternal

recurrence has attracted interest from ecotheorists because it promises, by opening the

way for a revaluation of values, just such a shift. Critics such as Hallman and

McGraw have seized on the ecological potential of Nietzsche’s thought. For example,

Hallman has aligned Nietzsche’s rejection of ‘epistemological anthropocentrism’ with

that of deep ecology. He suggests that, by rejecting such anthropocentrism,

Nietzsche’s philosophy ‘opens the way for a nonexploitative relationship of human

beings with nature’.112

However, while the issue of anthropomorphism is raised in Women in Love in

Nietzschean terms, it would be wrong to suggest that the novel offers any

straightforwardly Nietzschean solution to the issue. While Birkin rejects

anthropomorphism, his misanthropic desire that humanity be swept off the face of the

earth does not align easily with any of Nietzsche’s teachings. Moreover, the

polyphonic nature of the novel results in his misanthropic sentiments being

tempered.113 He is mocked and made to feel foolish by Ursula, who asks him whether

he believes ‘[s]imply in the end of the world, and grass?’ Again, his ‘dislike of

mankind’ is undercut by being pathologised, and described as amounting ‘almost to

an illness’.114 Even more tellingly, the novel refuses a straight Nietzschean solution to

the problem of anthropomorphism, by casting Gerald in the role of Übermensch.

111 Garrard, Ecocriticism, 24. 112 Hallman, ‘Environmental Ethics’, 117. Compare McGraw, ‘Earth-Enthusiast’, 278. 113 In ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, Lawrence famously wrote that ‘[t]he degree to which the system of morality, or the metaphysic, of any work of art is submitted to criticism within the work of art makes the lasting value and satisfaction of that work’ (89). 114 Lawrence, Women, 129, 61.

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Gerald as Übermensch is portrayed not as an earth-lover, but as a technologist

ruthlessly exploiting the earth. It is only later, when Lawrence returns to the thought

of eternal recurrence in a more sympathetic manner in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that

his vision accords more closely with a Nietzsche-inflected version of deep ecology,

such as that advocated by Hallman. Conversely, putting the point the other way

round, Lady Chatterley’s Lover offers one fictional exploration of how such a version

of deep ecology might be imagined.

While Lawrence’s recourse to Nietzsche underpins partial affinities between his

writings and those of deep ecology, it simultaneously distinguishes his approach from

that of later ‘social ecologists’ and ‘eco-Marxists’. As Garrard informs us, these

theorists address environmental problems as social problems that arise from the

capitalist form of production, and seek to redress such problems by changing the

political structure of society.115 As the social ecologist Murray Bookchin puts it:

‘present ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved,

without resolutely dealing with problems within society’. Lawrence’s rejection of

communism in the Lady Chatterley novels may be disquieting to social ecologists and

eco-Marxists, given their desire to confront environmental problems ‘by collective

action and major social movements’.116 Certainly, the issue of environmentalism in

the Lady Chatterley novels is complicated when they are not viewed, through the lens

of a Lukácsian theory of the politics of the novel, as realist novels. When Connie’s

retreat into the woods at Wragby is read as a Nietzschean and apocalyptic parable or

allegory, the historical significance of the novels can be recognized. The final version

115 Garrard, Ecocriticism, 31-3. 116 Murray Bookchin, ‘What is Social Ecology?’, in Michael E. Zimmerman (ed.), Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993), 354-73, 354, 356.

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of the novel is not simply a tale of personal regeneration, but carries a wider historical

import, signaling the inauguration of what Lawrence called the ‘post-tragic epoch’. Of

course, there are a number of ways that such a historical parable or allegory could be

re-translated into social and political terms. Nevertheless, one interpretation that is

foreclosed, given the rejection of such a solution within the novel, is as a parable of

Marxist revolution.

On the contrary, it might be suspected that Lady Chatterley’s Lover has more in

common with right-wing ecological movements. Situating the novel within the

historical context of early twentieth-century proto-environmental movements, Anna

Bramwell and David Bradshaw have drawn attention to Lawrence’s relationship with

the politically right-wing Rolf Gardiner, who later founded the Soil Association in

1945, and John Hargrave, founder and socially-conservative leader of the Kindred of

the Kibbo Kift (KKK).117 As Bradshaw has shown, some of Mellors’ proposals for

social regeneration—and particularly his desire for men to wear bright red trousers—

accord closely with those of Hargrave.118 For these reasons, the ‘vision’ of the Lady

Chatterley novels differs from that of later social ecologists and eco-Marxists.

It should be recognized that Lawrence’s adaptations of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal

recurrence underpin different versions of reactionary modernism. Advancing a

temporal reinterpretation of Jeffrey Hurst’s concept of ‘reactionary modernism’, Peter

Osborne argues that ‘reactionary philosophical modernism’ is constituted by a

particular inflection in the temporality of modernity, where ‘reaction’ is to be

117 Bramwell, 112-3; David Bradshaw, ‘Red Trousers: Lady Chatterley’s Lover and John Hargrave’, Essays in Criticism, 55/4 (2005), 352-73. 118 Bradshaw, ‘Red Trousers’, 357.

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understood as a movement towards the reversal of an existing state of affairs.119 Both

Heidegger and Löwith employed the thought of eternal recurrence to articulate

versions of such a reactionary modernism. For Heidegger, the thought of eternal

recurrence comes to define modernity as the most recent historical epoch, in which

being is revealed as techne. Modernity, thus understood, is a negative phenomenon: it

is an age characterized by the unbridled technological mastery of the earth, and the

reduction of humans and natural resources to standing-reserve. As an alternative to

such an unattractive modernity, Heidegger in his later writings cautiously raised the

possibility of a new mode of the revelation of being, which would issue in a new

historical beginning or origin (Ursprung).

By contrast, Löwith presented the thought of eternal recurrence, in its anthropological

form, as a reaction to modernity, and an attempt to overcome it. ‘Modernity’ for

Nietzsche, claims Löwith, ‘is sick’; it is ‘empty’, a ‘desert’. The reactive aspect of the

thought of eternal recurrence is conveyed in Löwith’s various formulations: Nietzsche

supposedly ‘confronts [his] view of modernity with the idea of eternal recurrence’;

the thought of eternal recurrence should ‘strike modernity’; it is ‘a counterweight to

the “modernity” of decayed Christianity’.120 The thought of eternal recurrence

opposes modernity, on Löwith’s interpretation, by attempting to repeat or restore a

pre-Socratic view of the world ‘on the peak of modernity’.121

Just like Heidegger and Löwith, Lawrence employed the thought of eternal recurrence

to articulate reactionary stances towards modernity. In Women in Love, the

unsympathetic portrayal of eternal recurrence parallels Heidegger’s view of the 119 Osborne, Politics of Time, 166. 120 Löwith, Eternal Recurrence, 84, 137, 85, my emphasis. 121 Löwith, Eternal Recurrence, 95, 108-21.

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thought as defining the age of modernity. As with Heidegger’s hostile

characterization of modernity, there is no redemptive potential located within

Gerald’s principle of mechanical repetition. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the more

sympathetic adaptation of eternal recurrence parallels Löwith’s interpretation of that

thought as an attempt to repeat a pre-Socratic view of the world ‘on the peak of

modernity’. Connie attempts to restore an early-Greek attitude towards the body and

earth. As for Löwith, modernity is seen as something that is to be overcome, and

superseded by a new age. Lawrence’s reactionary modernism is reflected in the

negative depiction of technology in both novels: either as embodying the principle of

mechanical repetition, or—as conveyed symbolically by Clifford’s mechanical

wheelchair—as characterizing the industrial-Platonic epoch.

Yet, we might wonder, are technology and industry necessarily bad? Is it not, it might

be asked from a social ecological or an eco-Marxist perspective, the social relations

that are problematic within industrial capitalism, and not simply the technology,

viewed abstracted from these relations? A contrast could be made between

Lawrence’s adaptations of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence, and that of

Walter Benjamin.

Benjamin employed Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence to articulate a non-

reactionary form of modernism. He employed the thought to articulate the temporality

of modernity as the new as the ever-same, which, as we have seen, is inherently

ambiguous: while on the one aspect it hellish, it also involves hope, and the prospect

of happiness through a redeemed future. Tellingly, this prospect of redemption is

located within modernity, and not as a reaction to modernity: the ‘exact repetition’

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analysed by Marx as a feature of modern commodity production holds the hope for a

redeemed future within modernity. Benjamin’s adaptation, unlike those of Lawrence,

thereby left open the possibility that there was revolutionary potential within the time

of modernity as that of the ‘now-as-the-ever-the-same’. Correlatively, unlike

Lawrence, Benjamin adopted a far more ambivalent towards technology, famously

seeking emancipatory political potential within the realm of mechanical reproduction.

Indeed, this more positive attitude towards technology is evident in his description of

the doctrine of eternal recurrence as ‘a dream of the immense discoveries imminent in

the field of reproduction technology’.122

Despite underpinning a reactionary form of modernism, it should be recognized that

Lawrence’s use of the thought of eternal recurrence in Women in Love and Lady

Chatterley’s Lover forms part of a powerful critique of the industrial spoliation of the

earth. Both novels make a welcome advance beyond Lawrence’s use of Nietzsche’s

thought to support an authoritarian leadership politics in Movements on European

History. In Women in Love, the thought is deployed, alongside other Nietzschean

motifs, to create a powerful and damning portrayal of the repetitive, mechanical

temporality of industrial capitalism. And in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the thought is

re-adapted, in a manner that thankfully moves beyond the politics of the leadership

novels, to imagine a green Nietzschean revaluation of the earth and body.

122 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, 182.

PART 3:

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE PAGEANT OF MUTABILITIE

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There is a long critical history of explicating Virginia Woolf’s novels, and their

formally-innovative explorations of time, by means of Henri Bergson’s distinction

between durée and clock-time. Floris Delattre’s Le Roman psychologique de Virginia

Woolf (1932) is the first major study in this tradition. Therein, he claimed that ‘[la]

conception de la durée, dans laquelle Bergson a essayé d’appréhender dans leur

intégrité les données du moi immédiat, est à la source même du roman de Virginia

Woolf’.1 Subsequent studies, which similarly see Woolf’s novels as exploring a

private psychological time, similar to that which had been philosophically articulated

by Bergson, include those of James Hafley, Shiv Kumar, James Naremore, and Mary

Ann Gillies.2 Gillies, for example, claims that ‘Bergson’s place in Woolf’s writing

was extensive and pervasive’.3 She argues that Woolf’s famous ‘moments of being’

are ‘moments of pure durée’, and that ‘[i]n order to capture these moments, Woolf

manipulates traditional narrative form’.4 She advances a reading of almost all of

Woolf’s experimental fiction as ever-more-sophisticated attempts to represent such a

durée, and concludes that, like Bergson, Woolf ‘chose to write about the inner life; to

depict this as fluid, chaotic, and continually mobile; to insist that real living occurred

in extraordinary moments of being in which time was conflated and all moments

existed simultaneously’.5

1 Floris Delattre, Le Roman psychologique de Virginia Woolf (Paris: J. Vrin, 1932), 134. Part of this study appeared earlier in article form as ‘La Durée bergsonienne dans le roman de Virginia Woolf’, Revue anglo-américaine, 9/2 (December 1931), 97-108. Woolf was aware of the publication of Delattre’s study, writing in her diary on 24 March 1932: ‘[t]wo Books on Virginia Woolf have just appeared—in France & Germany’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume IV: 1931-1935, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1982), 85). 2 James Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954); Kumar, Stream of Consciousness, 64-102; James Naremore, The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven, CT: Yale Univeristy Press, 1973); and Gillies, Bergson, 107-31. 3 Gillies, Bergson, 130. 4 Gillies, Bergson, 59, 109-10. 5 Gillies, Bergson, 131. In her Bergsonian interpretation of Woolf’s experimental fiction, Gillies displays only marginally more restraint than Kumar, and his striking claim that ‘[a]ll [of Woolf’s] literary experiments as a novelist can be explained in terms of Bergson’s la durée’ (Stream of Consciousness, 68).

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It is a moot point whether Woolf ever read Bergson, and how familiar she was with

his philosophy. Certainly, she wrote in a letter of 1932 that ‘I have never read

Bergson’, a claim which Leonard Woolf corroborated after her death, writing to

James Hafley in 1949 that ‘Mrs. Woolf did not read a word of Bergson’.6 However,

the question of whether Bergson influenced Woolf or not is immaterial for critics such

as Randall Stevenson who, as we saw in the introduction to this thesis, accepts

Stephen Kern’s Bergsonian theorization of time in modernism and modernity. For

such critics, it is perfectly legitimate to claim that Woolf’s novels explore Bergson’s

contrast between durée and clock-time, irrespective of any possible influence. Indeed,

Stevenson argues that the Bergsonian distinction between ‘time in the mind’ and

‘time on the clock’ underlies ‘much of Woolf’s view of time’.7

Correlatively, while critics such as Kumar, Gillies and Stevenson have read Woolf

through Bergson’s concepts, her writing has also become a mainstay for broader

Bergsonian interpretations of time in modernism. She is commonly deployed to

illustrate and support the deeply-entrenched Bergsonian understanding of time in

modernist literature. For example, in his introduction to modernism, Peter Childs

invokes Mrs Dalloway (1925) and ‘Woolf’s mature fiction’ to illustrate his claim that

6 Letter to Harmon H. Goldstone, 16 August 1932; The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume V: 1932-1935, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), 91. From a letter quoted in Hafley, Glass, 174. Leonard similarly wrote in a letter of 29 May 1944 to Margaret Thwaites that ‘I doubt whether Mrs Woolf had read any Bergson’, and again in a letter of 14 December 1968 to Roberta Rubenstein that ‘I dont think [Virginia] had read or was at all influenced by Bergson’ (Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. Frederic Spotts (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 485, 571). On the issue of Bergson’s possible influence on Woolf, see Michael H. Whitworth, Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 122. 7 Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 140.

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Bergson’s philosophy of time, and his distinction between durée and clock-time,

‘changed the way many Modernists represented time in fiction’.8

More recently, critics such as Sanja Bahun and Angeliki Spiropoulou have compared

time in Woolf’s writing to the historical time of Walter Benjamin.9 This comparison

makes a welcome advance beyond Bergsonian readings of time in Woolf. As Jane

Goldman has pointed out, Bergsonian readings of Woolf have tended to obscure the

political aspects of her writings. They misleadingly present her as apolitically

divorced from ‘the historical’, and from what Alex Zwerdling has called ‘“the real

world”’.10 She contends that ‘[t]o characterize all of Woolf’s writing in terms of the

[Bergsonian] “continuous movement of inner life” is to risk its homogenization into

an unbroken record of life as inner flux, and of existence primarily as passive,

subjective and ahistorical’.11 By contrast, through drawing comparisons with

Benjamin’s historical time, critics such as Spiropoulou have shown that Woolf’s

treatment of time is both historical and political. For instance, although she does not

8 Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), 49. 9 Sanja Bahun, ‘The Burden of the Past, the Dialectics of the Present: Notes on Virginia Woolf’s and Walter Benjamin’s Philosophies of History’, Modernist Cultures, 3/2 (2008), 100-15, and Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 144-94. Angeliki Spiropoulou, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). See also Hilary Thompson, ‘Time and its Countermeasures: Modern Messianisms in Woolf, Benjamin, and Agamben’, in Stephen Ross (ed.), Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate (London: Routledge, 2009), 86-98. 10 Goldman, Feminist Aesthetics, 4; Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 11 Goldman, Feminist Aesthetics, 4. What Goldman diagnoses as the apolitical nature of Bergsonian readings of Woolf is illustrated by Gillies’s claim that Woolf ‘set out to develop new narrative strategies to show . . . that [the] moment is a profound inner experience that is every bit as important as the more public events of the external world’ (Bergson, 110). Against Bergsonian interpretations of Woolf’s moments, Goldman’s study of Woolf’s feminist aesthetics seeks ‘to place the Woolfian moment in the context of “the real world”, that is in the material and historical realm beyond merely the personal and subjective’ (1). In another significant attempt to move beyond Bergsonian readings of time in Woolf, Ann Banfield has re-situated Woolf’s writing in the context of Cambridge philosophy of time, and has argued that the time of To the Lighthouse (1927) finds a close counterpart in Bertrand Russell’s ‘conception of real time as physical time’ (‘Time Passes: Virginia Woolf, Post-Impressionism and Cambridge Time’, Poetics Today, 24/3 (Fall 2003), 471-516, 479). She cites Goldman’s warning that Bergsonian readings of Woolf risk turning away from ‘the real world’, yet her own reading of Woolf in terms of Cambridge philosophy is arguably just as apolitical (479).

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explicitly mention Bergson, Spiropoulou advertises that her ‘critical constellation’

between Woolf and Benjamin is intended to unsettle ‘the standard critical perception

that modernism represents a flight from history into the mind of the individual’. She

argues instead that Woolf’s innovative views of history and historical time function

‘as a medium of her politics’.12

In the third part of this study, I will address the historical time of Woolf’s Between the

Acts (1941) and late writing in a manner which seeks to contest Bergsonian readings

of time in Woolf, and yet differs from Bahun and Spiropoulou’s approaches. I fully

endorse Spiropoulou’s attempts to highlight the importance of historical time in

Woolf’s writings, and to demonstrate its political nature. Moreover, I am sympathetic

to the situation of Woolf’s writings in the context of the philosophical discourse of

modernity. Nevertheless, I will contest both her and Bahun’s alignment of Woolf’s

approach to history with that of Benjamin. In the introduction to this thesis we saw

that, as Peter Osborne has shown, modernity contains within its abstract temporal

form a range of competing possible temporalizations of history, of which Martin

Heidegger’s temporalization of history as tradition, and Walter Benjamin’s

temporalization of history as the destruction of tradition, are emblematic.13

Spiropoulou aligns Woolf’s approach to history with that of Benjamin, and argues

that like him, she effects a destruction of tradition.14 On the contrary, by focussing on

Between the Acts and Woolf’s late writing, I will argue that Woolf’s approach to

history is more like that of Heidegger than that of Benjamin, and that she

temporalized history as tradition rather than as the destruction of tradition. To do so is

12 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 3-4. 13 Osborne, Politics of Time, 116. 14 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 58, 148-52.

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to argue for a revised understanding of Woolf’s conception of history, and on that

basis, for a new understanding of her politics.

My argument will proceed in three stages. In chapter 3.1, I will draw a comparison

between Miss La Trobe’s pageant in Between the Acts and Mutabiltie’s pageant in the

Mutabilitie Cantos of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596, 1609). Through

this comparison, I will elucidate the role that the aevum—an order of duration which

lies between time and eternity—plays in Between the Acts. The pageant portrays both

swallows and its chorus of villagers as subsisting in the aevum, and as persisting

unchanged across history. Turning to the politics of time, I will show that the fiction

of the aevum in Between the Acts carries a deeply suspect politics from the

perspective of both gender and class.

In chapter 3.2, I will compare the historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant, which is

marked by the ticking of a gramophone, to philosophical accounts of time in the

phenomenological tradition, and notably to Heidegger’s account of historicality

(Geschichtlichkeit) in Being and Time (1927). In stark contrast to Bergson’s durée,

the historical time of the pageant resembles Heidegger’s historicality in being a

historical and communal form of temporality, marked by repetition. It is not negated

or collapsed by the aevum portrayed by the pageant. Instead, it co-exists with this

order of duration, much as time coexists with the aevum in The Faerie Queene, and in

the scholastic philosophy from which the concept is drawn. In chapter 3.3, I will use

the comparison between the time of the pageant and Heidegger’s historicality to

address the issue of the politics of tradition in Between the Acts and Woolf’s late

writing.

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Overall, my approach in the following chapters will be to address the question of

Woolf’s politics through her conception of historical time. That Woolf thought

innovatively about history and historiography from a feminist perspective is not in

doubt. Critics such as Rachel Bowlby and Melba Cuddy-Keane have convincingly

elucidated some of the feminist aspects of Woolf’s views on history and

historiography by drawing on Woolf’s suggestions to Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell

that history ought to be completely re-written, the famous suggestion in A Room of

One’s Own (1929) for students to ‘re-write history’, which ‘often seems a little queer

as it is, unreal, lop-sided’, and her own repeated plans to write a work on the ‘lives of

the obscure’.15 Addressing her portrayal of an aeviternal nature and a repetitive

historical time reveals further feminist aspects of her vision of history.

What is more open to debate is how Woolf’s innovative views of history relate to

class. Spiropoulou draws attention to one possible tension between feminism and

class in Woolf’s politics when she points out that, while Woolf’s championing of the

‘daughters of educated men’ in Three Guineas (1938) is feminist, it nevertheless

15 Rachel Bowlby has argued that ‘Woolf’s challenge to what she identifies as a masculine history (great wars, great nations, great men) anticipates the principles and practices of explicitly feminist history’ (Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 31). Melba Cuddy-Keane has drawn attention to feminist aspects of Woolf’s ‘pluralistic approach to history’: see her ‘Virginia Woolf and the Varieties of Historicist Experience’, in Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino (eds), Virginia Woolf and the Essay (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 59-77. In her diary entry of 29 April 1921, Woolf recorded a conversation she had with Lytton Strachey, in which she agreed with him that ‘[h]istory must be written all over again’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1920-1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 115). In a 1928 letter to Clive Bell, she asks whether history ought ‘not all to be re-written instantly?’ (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III: 1923-1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 454). Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own; Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 58. Woolf repeatedly planned to write a work on the lives of the obscure, for example writing in her diary entry for 20 July 1925: ‘I want to read voraciously & gather material for the Lives of the Obscure—which is to tell the whole history of England in one obscure life after another’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume III: 1925-1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), 37).

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seems to favour upper-middle class women at the expense of working class women.16

How do Woolf’s views of history relate to class? Did she hold a revolutionary

materialist conception of history? Or did she think of history more conservatively in

terms of the continuation of tradition? The following chapters will address such

questions through the politics of time.

16 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 10-1.

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3.1 The Pageant of Mutabilitie

The pageant in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) is most immediately, as

Joshua Esty has made clear, a version of the ‘modern pageant-play’. This is a genre

that was established by Louis Napoleon Parker in 1905, and includes T. S. Eliot’s The

Rock (1934), and E. M. Forster’s ‘Abinger Pageant’ (1934) and England's Pleasant

Land (1938).17 According to Esty, writers such as Woolf, Eliot, and Forster turned to

this genre in what became a defining feature of late modernism: the attempt,

following the instability and dissolution of the British Empire, to imagine new forms

of English national history and tradition.18 The pageant in Woolf’s last novel also

resembles other theatre forms. Critics have drawn suggestive parallels with ancient

Greek drama (possibly mediated by Jane Harrison’s work on ancient drama and

community), Elizabethan theatre, and Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre.19

In this chapter, I will place the pageant in a new context, and read it alongside

Mutabilitie’s pageant in the Mutabilitie Cantos of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie

Queene (1596, 1609). By comparing Miss La Trobe’s pageant to Mutabilitie’s

pageant, I will elucidate the role played by the aevum in Between the Acts. The aevum

was, as Frank Kermode informs us, conceived by scholastic philosophers as an order

of duration which lies between time and eternity. It ‘does not abolish time or

17 Joshua Esty, ‘Amnesia in the Fields: Late Modernism, Late Imperialism, and the English Pageant Play’, ELH, 69/1 (Spring 2002), 245-76, 246-7. See also Ayako Yoshino, ‘Between the Acts and Louis Napoleon Parker—the Creator of the Modern English Pageant’, Critical Survey, 15/2 (May 2003), 49-60. 18 See Joshua Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 54-61. 19 For example, on ancient Greek drama, see Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘The Politics of Comic Modes in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts’, PMLA, 105/2 (March 1990), 273-85, 274-5. On Elizabethan theatre, see Brenda R. Silver, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Concept of Community: The Elizabethan Playhouse’, Women’s Studies, 4/2 (1977), 291-8. I will return to the similarity between Miss La Trobe’s pageant and Elizabethan theatre in chapter 3.3. On comparisons with Brecht’s epic theatre, see below.

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spatialize it; it co-exists with time, and is a mode in which things can be perpetual

without being eternal’.20 In the Mutabilitie Cantos, the aevum is the state which helps

Nature to triumph (somewhat ambiguously) over Mutabilitie, who had claimed that

all is susceptible to change and decay. Woolf makes similar use of the concept of the

aevum in her late modernist imagination of English history. In Miss La Trobe’s

pageant, nature is aeviternal, and remains constant throughout the vicissitudes of

history. It offers a reassuring sense of stability to those at Pointz Hall who are

threatened by the rise of fascism, the disintegration of the British Empire, and the

prospect of a violent World War.

Spenser’s and Woolf’s Pageants

Towards the end of her life, Woolf took great interest in Edmund Spenser’s The

Faerie Queene, during which period she also wrote Between the Acts.21 She read

Spenser’s epic poem in 1935, remarking in her diary on 23 January 1935 that: ‘I am

reading the Faery Queen—with delight. I shall write about it’.22 She took notes on the

first four books of the poem in what is now known as ‘Reading Notebook XLV’.23

Therein, she recorded in an entry dated 11 March 1935 that ‘I have decided to stop

20 Kermode, Ending, 70-2. 21 The first page of the first draft of what was to become Between the Acts, which is headed ‘Summer Night’, is dated ‘2nd April 1938’ (see Virginia Woolf, Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: University Publications, 1983), 33). Arguably, the first allusion in Woolf’s diary to Between the Acts occurs on 19 January 1935: ‘I have an idea for a “play” Summers night’ (Diary, iv, 275). 22 Woolf, Diary, iv, 275. 23 Virginia Woolf, ‘Reading Notebook XLV’, Sussex, Monks House Papers, B.2m. As Brenda R. Silver points out, Woolf’s notes on The Faerie Queene in this notebook were taken between 20 January and 11 March 1935 (Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 211). Woolf’s notes are taken from J. Payne Collier’s edition of Works of Edmund Spenser, 5 vols (London: Bell and Daldy, 1869); all references to The Faerie Queene in this chapter will be to this edition. Virginia and Leonard also owned a copy of The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. Morris (London; New York: Macmillan, 1899), which Leonard had signed (see King and Miletic-Vejzovic, Library, 211).

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reading FQ./ at the end of the 4th book/ because I am completely out of the mood’.24

After a break, she decided to return to the poem, writing in her diary on 13 June 1935:

‘I will now go on with the F. Queen. & finish it. The mood has come back’.25

As planned, Woolf did write about The Faerie Queene. She wrote an essay called

‘The Faery Queen’, which was first published posthumously by Leonard Woolf in

The Moment and Other Essays (1947).26 Therein, she remarked that Spenser, though

‘remote from us in time, in speech, in convention’, yet ‘seems to be talking about

things that are important to us too’, and that in his poetry are ‘the qualities that agitate

living people at the moment’.27 She also wrote about Spenser and The Faerie Queene

in her late unfinished project, which was to be ‘a Common History book’; in

particular, Spenser features prominently in ‘Anon’, which was to be the first chapter

of this work.28 In preparation for writing this book, she took more notes on The Faerie

Queene in what is now known as ‘Reading Notebook XXXVII’.29

Woolf encountered the Mutabilitie Cantos as part of her reading of The Faerie

Queene. These posthumously-published Cantos stand in a somewhat vexed

relationship to the other parts of the poem. They were first published in 1609 under a

title which was probably supplied by their printer, Matthew Lownes: Two Cantos of

24 Woolf, ‘Notebook XLV’, 11. Similarly, Woolf wrote in her diary on 11 March 1935 that ‘I have read myself to a standstill in the F.Q.: & shall not press the mood till it returns naturally’ (Diary, iv, 287). 25 Woolf, Diary, iv, 321. 26 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Faery Queen’, in The Moment and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1947), 24-30; all references here will be to the version of the essay published in Essays, vi, 487-92. 27 Woolf, ‘Faery’, 488, 491. 28 See Woolf’s diary entry for 12 September 1940; The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume V: 1936-1941, ed. Anne Oliver Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 318. See also Virginia Woolf, ‘“Anon and “The Reader”: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays’, ed. Brenda R. Silver, Twentieth Century Literature, 25/3-4 (Autumn-Winter 1979), 356-441, 389-92. 29 Virginia Woolf, ‘Reading Notebook XXXVII’, Sussex, Monks House Papers, B.2c, 22-3. According to Silver, the notes in this notebook date from between 12 September 1940 and 28 March 1941 (Notebooks, 184).

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Mutabilitie: Which, both for Forme and Matter, appeare to be parcell of some

following Booke of the Faerie Queene, Under The Legend of Constancie.30 They

appear under this title, following the first six books of The Faerie Queene, in J. Payne

Collier’s edition of Spenser’s Works (1869), which is the edition of Spenser that

Woolf used.31 We can be sure that Woolf knew the Mutabilitie Cantos, as she quoted

two lines from them in an early version of ‘Anon’:

Spenser heard the rhymers and the mummers. . . . And after her came jolly june arrayed All in greene leaves, as he a player were. He had seen the man at the festival, and noted his green leaves when the Queen saw the masque at Kenilworth.32

As Silver points out, the two lines which I have italicised are a quotation from the

Mutabilitie Cantos: they describe the allegorical figure ‘June’, who processes as one

of the ‘Monthes’ in Mutabilitie’s pageant.33 Woolf’s comment below, following J.

Payne Collier’s gloss in the edition she was reading, suggests that the allegorical

figure June was inspired by a masque Spenser might have seen at Kenilworth in 1575,

at which Queen Elizabeth was present.34

However, more than simply showing that Woolf knew the Mutabilitie Cantos, these

lines invite a comparison between Mutabilitie’s pageant and Miss La Trobe’s pageant

in Between the Acts. It is significant that Woolf quoted lines which describe June’s

role in Mutabilitie’s pageant, given that Miss La Trobe’s pageant is held on ‘a June

30 See Jane Grogan, ‘Introduction’, in Jane Grogan (ed.), Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 1-23, 1, 18. 31 Spenser, Works, iv, 241-86, 241. 32 Woolf, ‘Anon’, 416-7, my italics. These lines form part of what Brenda Silver calls the ‘A version’ of ‘Anon’; in the later ‘C version’, an allusion to the Mutabilitie Cantos, but not a direct quotation, remains: ‘Spenser . . . had seen “the player dressed in green”—the old play that the peasants acted when spring came and to placate the earth, the mummer hung himself with green leaves’ (‘Anon’, 392). 33 Silver, ‘Anon’, 417; Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vii.35, in Works, iv, 274. 34 See Silver, ‘Anon’, 417.

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day’.35 Moreover, The Faerie Queene is explicitly mentioned in Between the Acts as

one of the books which Isa notices whilst browsing in the Pointz Hall library.36

Bearing in mind these suggestive connections, we can pursue the comparison between

the two pageants.37

In the Mutabilitie Cantos, the allegorical figure Mutabilitie challenges Jove, and

ambitiously claims dominion over heaven and earth on the grounds that both are

subject to change. Jove agrees to meet her challenge, and their dispute is presided

over by ‘great dame Nature’ on Arlo hill.38 In making her case, Mutabilitie argues that

Earth, Water, Air and Fire are all subject to change. She then requests that Nature

bring forth ‘The rest which doe the world in being hold;/ As times and seasons of the

yeare that fall’, so that it may be judged whether they are likewise subject to change.39

Nature obliges, and calls forth a pageant of the Seasons, the Months, Day and Night,

the Hours and finally Life and Death, all of which process before the gathered

assembly. Jove replies to Mutabilitie’s pageant that although all things ‘that under

heaven dwell/ Are chaung’d of Time’, yet the gods deserve still to rule, because they,

from their ‘heavenly cell’, are what makes Time himself move.40

35 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. Mark Hussey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 55. 36 Woolf, Acts, 14. 37 Woolf, Acts, 14. 38 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vii.5, in Works, iv, 263. As Richard A. McCabe points out, the allegorical debate on Arlo Hill, in which Mutabilitie, Time and Nature are personified to play their various parts, forms the most explicit exploration in The Faerie Queene of the poem’s pervasive theme of time: in the Mutabilitie Cantos, ‘all of the poem’s philosophical and theological attitudes converge in an intense exploration of the value of fortune, flux and time’ (The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1989), 199). 39 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vii.27, in Works, iv, 271. 40 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vii.48, in Works, iv, 280. Mutabilitie should be distinguished from time. Indeed, Mutabilitie visits ‘Tyme’, who lives in ‘the Circle of the Moone’: ‘an hory/ Old aged Sire, with hower-glasse in hand’ (Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vi.8, in Works, iv, 244).

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Nature, in her role of arbitrator of the dispute, passes her verdict. She decides, in a

passage which echoes the depiction of the Garden of Adonis in the third book of The

Faerie Queene (III.vi), that although all things are changed, ‘They are not changed

from their first estate’, and ‘turning to themselves at length againe,/ Doe worke their

owne perfection so by fate’.41 Consequently, Mutabilitie is defeated, and Nature

asserts her own power over her: ‘Cease therefore, daughter, further to aspire,/ And

thee content thus to be rul’d by me’.42 Nature also points ahead to the eschaton, which

will inaugurate a changeless, eternal state: ‘But time shall come that all shall changed

bee,/ And from thenceforth none no more change shall see’.43 In the two stanzas of

the ‘unperfite’ eighth canto, the poet reflects on Nature’s verdict, and although he

concedes that Mutabilitie was unworthy to rule Heaven, yet holds that ‘In all things

else she bears the greatest sway’.44

Miss La Trobe’s pageant is, like Mutabilitie’s pageant, centrally concerned with the

question of change over time. In the Pointz Hall pageant, although the seasons do not

process as allegorical figures in front of the audience, their passing is conveyed by the

villagers’ songs: ‘summer and winter and spring; and spring and winter again;

ploughing and sowing, eating and growing; time passes’.45 These songs of the passing

of time and the cycling of the seasons suggest that ‘[a]ll passes’ and ‘all changes’,

much as Mutabilitie had claimed that all is subject to change.46

41 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vii.58, in Works, iv, 284. 42 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vii.59, in Works, iv, 284. 43 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vii.59, in Works, iv, 284. 44 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.viii.1, in Works, iv, 285. 45 Woolf, Acts, 91. 46 Woolf, Acts, 100.

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In the Mutabilitie Cantos, after her pageant, Mutabilitie puts forth the challenge

whether:

CHANGE doth not raign and beare the greatest sway; For who sees not that Time on all doth pray? But Times do change and move continually:

So nothing here long standeth in one stay: Wherefore, this lower world who can deny But to be subject still to Mutabilitie?47

The audience in Between the Acts discuss Miss La Trobe’s pageant in terms which are

markedly similar to those of Mutabilitie. During one of the intervals, an unidentified

member of the audience asks: ‘[d]'you think people change? Their clothes, of

course’.48 In a similar vein, following the Victorian scene, Mrs Lynn Jones

contemplates the disappearance of the Victorian home:

Time went on and on like the hands of the kitchen clock. (The machine chuffed in the bushes.) . . . Change had to come, she said to herself, or there’d have been yards and yards of Papa’s beard, of Mama’s knitting. Nowadays her son-in-law was clean shaven. Her daughter had a refrigerator.49

The pageant has caused Mrs Lynn Jones to think of the differences between the

Victorian age of her childhood and the present day. She notes, for instance, as an

index of modern technological advance, that her ‘daughter had a refrigerator’. The

scene is comic: collapsing the question of long-term change between historical ages

and the question of short-term change within an age, she humorously imagines that a

world without change would be one in which the Victorian ‘Home would have

remained; and Papa’s beard . . . would have grown and grown’.50 Nevertheless, the

issue of change over time and history is exactly that which is involved in Mutabilitie’s

pageant. Mrs Lynn Jones’s awareness of the effect of ‘Time’, which she associates

with the going ‘round and round and round’ of the hands of a kitchen clock, and

47 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vii.47, in Works, iv, 280. 48 Woolf, Acts, 88. 49 Woolf, Acts, 124-5. 50 Woolf, Acts, 125.

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which is also suggestively aligned with the historical time of the pageant through the

parenthetical remark that the ‘machine chuffed in the bushes’, parallels Mutabilitie’s

observations that ‘Time on all doth pray’, and that ‘Times do change and move

continually’. Her acknowledgement that ‘[c]hange had to come’ is similar to

Mutabilitie’s claim that ‘Change doth . . . raign’ and that ‘nothing here long standeth

on one stay’.51

Moreover, Mrs Lynn Jones goes on to contrast historical change and the

changelessness of ‘Heaven’ in a manner which resonates with the Mutabilitie Cantos.

In the Mutabilitie Cantos, Nature points ahead to the eschaton, when change will be

replaced by an eternal realm: ‘time shall come that all shall changed bee,/ And from

thenceforth, none no more change shall see.’52 Again, developing Nature’s

suggestion, the poet in the very last stanza of the poem looks ahead to the

time when no more Change shall be, But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd Upon the pillours of Eternity,

That is contrayr to Mutabilitie; For all that moveth doth in Change delight: But thence-forth all shall rest eternally With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight.53

Mrs Lynn Jones similarly contrasts change and eternity, and imagines a changeless

Heaven: ‘[w]hat she meant was, change had to come, unless things were perfect; in

which case she supposed they resisted Time. Heaven was changeless’.54 While both

Miss La Trobe’s and Mutabilitie’s pageants are centrally concerned with the issue of

change across history, they also both dramatise an aeviternal state which resists

51 Woolf, Acts, 125. 52 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vii.59, in Works, iv, 284. 53 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.viii.2, in Works, iv, 286. 54 Woolf, Acts, 125.

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change. As we shall see, the aeviternal permanence of Nature in The Faerie Queene

finds a close analogue in Miss La Trobe’s pageant.

The Aevum

Critics such as Frank Kermode and Richard McCabe have demonstrated the

importance of the concept of the aevum to The Faerie Queene.55 In his Summa

Theologiae (1274), Thomas Aquinas advanced the concept of the aevum as a third

order of duration which ‘lies somewhere between eternity and time’, and measures

things such as heavenly bodies and angels.56 The concept of aeviternity provided him

with a rationale for the peculiar mode of existence of angels, who are neither eternal

nor fully temporal, but rather inhabit this third order, and though immutable as to

substance, are capable of change by acts of will and intellect. As he put it: angels

‘combine unchangeable existence with changeability of choice at the natural level,

and with changeability of thoughts, affections and, in their own fashion, places’.57

As Kermode and McCabe make clear, the concept of the aevum, as well as accounting

for the quasi-temporal status of angels, also played an important role in harmonizing

developments in the interpretation of secular history. Placing it in its wider

intellectual context, McCabe informs us that the concept of the aevum arose

historically out of a conflict between Aristotle’s views of time, which re-emerged

from the eleventh-century onwards, and those of Medieval Christianity. Aristotle had

postulated an unending cycle of recurrent events, which at first seems difficult to

55 See Kermode, Ending, 70-81, and McCabe, Pillars, 36-8, 127-30, 132-53. 56 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Questions on God, ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006), 101. 57 Aquinas, Summa, 101.

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reconcile with the linear view of history adopted by the early Church fathers.58 The

aevum helped conceptually to reconcile these two forms of history in what McCabe

describes as ‘the Christianization of the Aristotelian viewpoint’.59 It was possible to

see human and animal life as attaining a cyclical perpetuity within the aevum, whilst

remaining within finite time. As Kermode puts it:

[t]hus was invented an image of endlessness consistent with a temporal end. Historical events might be unique, and given pattern by an end; yet there are perpetuities which defy both the uniqueness and the end. Human society thus took on certain angelic characteristics.60

Finally, it should be pointed out that the concept of the aevum soon acquired political

and juristic functions outside the narrow confines of scholastic philosophy, and

thereby took on a ‘politics of time’. Most notably, the concept was employed in the

theory of ‘the King’s Two Bodies’.61 According to this legal theory, the king’s

‘natural body’ was distinguished from his ‘body politic’; while the former was time-

bound, the latter was conceived as aeviternally perpetual, giving rise to the idea that

the monarch ‘never dies’. As Ernst Kantorowicz puts it, the body politic of kingship

‘represents, like the angels, the Immutable within Time’.62

In the Mutabilitie Cantos, the concept of the aevum facilitates Nature’s (ambiguous)

triumph over Mutabilitie. In her verdict on the dispute at Arlo Hill, Nature concedes

that all things are subject to change, yet rejects Mutabilitie’s arguments by, as

McCabe puts it, ‘discovering intimations of eternity within the recurrent cycles of

58 McCabe, Pillars, 36-7. See also Kermode, Ending, 68. 59 McCabe, Pillars, 37. 60 Kermode, Ending, 74. 61 See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), Kermode, Ending, 73, and McCabe, Pillars, 37-8. The concept was also used to establish the legal continuity and perpetuity of corporations, communities and empires: see Kantorowicz, Two Bodies, 273-314. 62 Kantorowicz, Two Bodies, 8; see also 171.

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generation, decay and death’.63 Significantly, her verdict echoes the presentation of

the Garden of Adonis in the third book of The Faerie Queene which is, as McCabe

points out, Spenser’s ‘most subtle and imaginative exploration of the aevum’.64

In the Garden of Adonis, Genius, the god of generation, allows all the ‘naked babes’

who so wish to leave the garden ‘to live in mortall state’, before returning to ‘grow

afresh’.65 This conceit of Genius repeatedly sending out ‘babes’ into the world, and

then readmitting them to the garden, conveys what Kermode describes as ‘the quasi-

immortality of the generative cycle’. This quasi-immortality is crystallized in the

figure of Adonis, whom Kermode interprets to be ‘the entire biological cycle,

conceived as subsisting in the aevum’.66 Adonis is preserved in an arbour at the centre

of the garden, ‘in the middest of that Paradise’.67 Although he is ‘subject to

mortalitie’, he yet ‘may not/ For ever dye’, and achieves an aeviternal perpetuity,

being ‘eterne in mutabilitie,/ And by succession made perpetuall’.68 His state of

existence foreshadows Nature’s triumph over Mutabilitie in the Mutabilitie Cantos.

Nature’s argument that all things ‘by their change their being doe dilate’ and turn ‘to

themselves at length againe,’ recalls Genius’s sending forth all that so desire into the

world, after which ‘they againe returne back by the hinder gate’. And Nature’s claim

that all things ‘doe their states maintaine’ despite being subject to change recalls

Adonis’s aeviternal state of being ‘Transformed oft’ and yet ‘by succession made

63 McCabe, Pillars, 208. 64 McCabe, Pillars, 138. Ayesha Ramachandran draws attention to the conceptual and rhetorical similarity between the portrayal of the Garden of Adonis and the Mutabilitie Cantos, and argues that ‘[t]he seeds of the Mutabilitie Cantos are in fact already evident in the stanzas describing the Garden, where Spenser imagines the place of Time within the seemingly eternal stasis of garden’s generative cycles’ (‘Mutabilitie’s Lucretian Metaphysics: Scepticism and Cosmic Process in Spenser’s Cantos’, in Jane Grogan (ed.), Celebrating Mutabilitie, 220-245, 224-5). 65 Spenser, Faerie, III.vi.32 and 33, in Works, ii, 455-6. 66 Kermode, Ending, 77-8. 67 Spenser, Faerie, III.vi.43, in Works, ii, 461. 68 Spenser, Faerie, III.vi.47, in Works, ii, 469.

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perpetuall’.69 Both Nature and Adonis triumph over mutability, finding permanence in

change. Spenser’s Nature inhabits the aevum, and is like Adonis in being ‘eterne in

mutabilitie’.70

Nature’s aeviternal existence in The Faerie Queene finds a parallel in Between the

Acts. Although ‘Nature’ does not appear as an allegorical figure in Miss La Trobe’s

pageant, nevertheless, as the Rev. Streatfield astutely points out, ‘nature takes her

part’.71 In Between the Acts, swallows synecdochically stand for a nature which

triumphs over mutability.72 As planned by Miss La Trobe, swallows take part in the

pageant.73 For instance, to the excitement of the audience, ‘real swallows darted

across the sheet’ during the Victorian picnic scene, and later, in the ‘Present Day’

scene, they danced ‘[r]ound and round, in and out they skimmed. Real swallows’.74

That the same swallows appear in scenes representing different historical ages both

forges a sense of continuity over time, and suggests that nature is changeless across

history.

Lucy Swithin embraces the sense of continuity which the swallows bring. During one

of the pageant’s intervals, she watches the swallows swooping from rafter to rafter in

the barn, and remarks how the swallows ‘come every year . . . the same birds’ from

Africa, ‘[a]s they had come, she supposed, when the barn was a swamp’.75 She

69 Spenser, Faerie, Mutabilitie.vii.58, in Works, iv, 284; Faerie, III.vi.32 and 33, in Works, ii, 455-6. 70 As Kermode puts it, Spenser’s Nature ‘is the goddess of what lives and changes in time under the conditions of a kind of immortality which is by definition of time’ (Ending, 79). 71 Woolf, Acts, 138. 72 Tellingly, when the Rev. Streatfield offers his interpretation that ‘nature takes her part’ in the pageant, the ‘swallows [swept] round him. They seemed cognisant of his meaning’ (Acts, 138). 73 Miss La Trobe plans to use nature in the pageant, writing in her stage directions: ‘try ten mins. of present time. Swallows, cows etc.’ (Acts, 129). 74 Woolf, Acts, 118, 131. 75 Woolf, Acts, 74-5.

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extends her conceit across the whole stretch of geological time about which she has

been reading in her Wellsian Outline of History:

“Swallows,” said Lucy, holding her cup, looking at the birds. Excited by the company they were flitting from rafter to rafter. Across Africa, across France they had come to nest here. Year after year they came. Before there was a channel, when the earth, upon which the Windsor chair was planted, was a riot of rhododendrons, and humming birds quivered at the mouths of scarlet trumpets, as she had read that morning in her Outline of History, they had come.76

By linking the remote geological past to the present day, the swallows provide Lucy

with a reassuring sense of historical continuity. The great changes which the earth has

undergone in this period, conveyed by Lucy’s imaginative juxtaposition of a riotous

primeval forest with the Windsor chair that is currently urbanely planted on the Pointz

Hall lawn, throw into relief a deeper continuity of nature: that of swallows migrating

year after year from Africa. Her idea that ‘the same birds’ have been coming from

Africa since the remote past is the idea of an aeviternally perpetual nature, which

corresponds to Nature’s aeviternal existence in The Faerie Queene.

Mrs Manresa is sceptical of Lucy’s conceit. She ‘smiled benevolently, humouring the

old lady’s whimsy. It was unlikely, she thought, that the birds were the same’.77 In

one sense, Mrs Manresa is quite correct: given a swallow’s life-span, it cannot

literally be the same birds which have been coming for thousands of years. However,

in another sense, her remark overlooks the permanence of birds when they are

conceived of as subsisting in the aevum. Aeviternal swallows may, like Adonis in his

garden, and like the monarch according to the theory of the King’s Two Bodies,

‘never die’. Lucy’s conceit thereby accords subtly with the pageant, and its fiction of

76 Woolf, Acts, 79. 77 Woolf, Acts, 74.

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an aeviternal nature, dramatised by the return of the same swallows throughout

different historical ages.

The swallows in Between the Acts suggest a continuity and stability within history,

which is nevertheless overshadowed by the prospect of a devastating war. In the

‘Present Day’ scene of the pageant, the swallows seem to foretell peace and

prosperity:

[t]he swallows—or martins were they?—The temple-haunting martins who come, have always come . . . Yes, perched on the wall, they seemed to foretell what after all the Times was saying yesterday. Homes will be built. Each flat with its refrigerator, in the crannied wall. Each of us a free man; plates washed by machinery; not an aeroplane to vex us; all liberated; made whole.78

That the swallows—or martins—‘have always come’, suggests again the idea of an

aeviternal nature. They promise a continued stability into the future, by seeming to

foretell the previous day’s optimistic news stories: that there will not be war (‘[e]ach

of us a free man’), but instead growth and prosperity (‘[h]omes will be built’). Of

course, such optimism is ironically misplaced, given the subsequent outbreak of war.

This irony is intensified by the mention of martins. As Gillian Beer notes, the

‘temple-haunting martins’ are an allusion to Macbeth, and to the ‘temple-haunting

martlet’ which ironically is interpreted to be a good omen by Banquo, shortly before

the King is murdered.79 To redouble the irony in Between the Acts, while the

swallows or martins seem to foretell that there will be ‘not an aeroplane to vex us’,

this turns out not to be the case. Later in the pageant, twelve ‘aeroplanes in perfect

formation’ interrupt the Rev. Streatfield’s speech, and foreshadow war.80

78 Woolf, Acts, 131. 79 Beer, Common Ground, 171; the allusion is to Macbeth, 1.vi.4. 80 Woolf, Acts, 138.

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The combination of aeviternal continuity and a devastating war in Between the Acts is

fully consonant. We saw above that the concept of the aevum was employed

historiographically to harmonise Aristotlelian cycles of recurrent events with linear

Church history which was given pattern by an ending—apocalypse. Indeed, this is the

shape of history in the Mutabilitie Cantos. Nature both asserts an aeviternal continuity

over change—all things ‘raigne over change, and doe their states maintaine’—and

points forward to the eschaton. Similarly, in Between the Acts, the aeviternal

continuity of nature symbolised by the swallows is combined with the prospect of

war, which at times assumes apocalyptic proportions. William Dodge speaks bluntly

to Isa of ‘“[t]he doom of sudden death hanging over us . . . There’s no retreating and

advancing”’.81

More subtly, apocalypse also appears in the novel in a darkly comic mode. Through

an ambiguity between the discourse time and the story time of the pageant, Giles

perhaps inadvertently wishes for there to be no future:

‘Another interval,’ Dodge read out, looking at the programme. ‘And after that, what?’ asked Lucy. ‘Present time. Ourselves,’ he read. ‘Let’s hope to God that's the end,’ said Giles gruffly.82

The same ambiguity between the end of the pageant and the end of the world allows

for further comedy:

[i]t was an awkward moment. How to make an end? . . . Then there was a scuffle behind the bush; a preliminary, premonitory scratching. A needle scraped a disc; chuff, chuff chuff; then having found the rut, there was a roll and a flutter which portended ‘God . . .’ (they all rose to their feet) ‘Save the King’.83

81 Woolf, Acts, 83. 82 Woolf, Acts, 126-7. 83 Woolf, Acts, 139-40.

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Here, the ‘roll and a flutter’ herald either the playing of the National Anthem, or, as

the sounding of the trumpets of the seven angels, apocalypse. Similarly, the word

‘God’ is ambiguously either the first word of the National Anthem, or refers to God

and thereby suggests the second coming and the end of history.84 Aeviternal nature

thereby offers a picture of constancy which is fully compatible with an end to time in

both The Faerie Queene and Between the Acts.

Gender and the Politics of a Changeless Nature

While Miss La Trobe’s pageant portrays nature as subsisting in the aevum, Woolf was

acutely aware of the abusive roles which ‘nature’, and particularly changeless nature,

could be made to play with gender. In Three Guineas (1938), she turned a critical eye

to the concept of ‘Nature’, and its deployment in misogynistic arguments, such as

those which sought to deny women the right to a university education: ‘Nature was

called in; Nature it was claimed who is not only omniscient but unchanging, had made

the brain of woman of the wrong shape or size’. Unchanging nature, and the

biological structure of women’s brains, is evoked in such arguments as a reason for

denying women a university education; even once admitted to the universities, it was

claimed that the brain of woman was ‘not the creative brain; the brain that can bear

responsibility and earn the higher salaries’.85 Sexual difference is here inscribed in an

unchangeable nature, and used as a pretext for keeping women out of the universities

and out of the professions.

84 See Revelation 8:6. 85 Woolf, Guineas, 359-60.

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Sexual difference, supposedly inscribed in nature, takes a particularly alarming turn

under fascist regimes. Woolf’s narrator remarks in a note to Three Guineas that

[t]he nature of manhood and the nature of womanhood are frequently defined both by Italian and German dictators. Both repeatedly insist that it is the nature of man and indeed the essence of manhood to fight. Hitler, for example, draws a distinction between ‘a nation of pacifists and a nation of men’. Both repeatedly insist that it is the nature of womanhood to heal the wounds of the fighter.86

The gender roles constructed by fascism, then made out to be ‘natural’—man as

fighter, and woman as healer—are deeply problematic, and Woolf welcomes the

contestation by pacifist movements of the supposedly ‘“natural and eternal law”’ that

man is a fighter.87 The narrator of Three Guineas is similarly undaunted by Julian

Huxley’s warning in his Essays in Popular Science (1926) that ‘man and woman

differ in every cell of their body in regard to the number of their chromosomes . . .

[which] have been shown by the last decade’s work to be the bearers of heredity’, and

that ‘any considerable alteration of the hereditary constitution is an affair of millennia,

not of decades’.88 Nature here is viewed not as eternal and unchanging, but, through

the perspective of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, as permitting hereditary

change at a glacial pace, over the course of millennia. Undeterred, Woolf’s narrator

comments wryly in response that ‘as science also assures us that our life on earth is

“an affair of millennia, not of decades”, some alteration in the hereditary constitution

may be worth attempting’.89

86 Woolf, Guineas, 412. 87 Woolf, Guineas, 412. 88 Woolf, Guineas, 410-1, 413; the quotations are from Julian Huxley, Essays in Popular Science (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), 64-5. In context, Huxley is rejecting Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting’s view in their The Dominant Sex: A Study in the Sociology of Sex Differentiation, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1923), that the ‘biological differences between the sexes in man are negligible’ (63). 89 Woolf, Guineas, 413.

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In all these cases, Woolf is acutely critical of conceptions of nature that are used to

legitimate gender inequality, such as the exclusion of women from the universities, or

to define the roles of men and women in a bellicose fascist society. Such conceptions

of nature, whether as eternal and changeless, or only as admitting change at a minute

rate over the course of millennia, are to be challenged. ‘And must we not’, writes

Woolf, ‘and do we not change this unalterable nature?’90 The paradoxical formulation

of this defiant call to change the unchangeable invites suspicion concerning

formulations of an unchangeable nature: such a ‘nature’ turns out to be artifice, and

moreover, one that can be challenged and rejected.91

The aeviternally changeless nature depicted by Miss La Trobe’s pageant is similarly

problematic. While Lucy finds the fiction that the same swallows have been visiting

since the time when the barn was a swamp a comforting one, swallows also possess

more sinister connotations in the novel. As critics such as Jane Marcus, Gillian Beer

and Jane de Gay have made clear, swallows are associated in the novel with rape,

violence and murder. All of these critics have drawn attention to the novel’s allusions

to Algernon’s Swinburne’s poem ‘Itylus’, which is based on the myth of Procne and

Philomena, the best-known version of which occurs in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.92 As

Bart leaves the barn where Lucy has been contemplating the swallows, he mutters the

90 Woolf, Guineas, 361. 91 Similarly, on St Paul’s use of the ‘argument from nature’, Woolf’s narrator writes: ‘[t]he argument from nature may seem to us susceptible of amendment; nature, when allied with financial advantage, is seldom of divine origin’ (Guineas, 392). 92 Jane Marcus suggests that Woolf rewrote Swinburne’s poem in Between the Acts, retrieving the myth’s ‘original claim of the power of sisterhood over the patriarchal family’, and turning it into a tale of ‘sorority and revenge for rape’ (Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 76, 80, 93). Beer draws attention to Swinburne’s poem, and points out that the swallows ‘who sweep constantly across the barn recall the myth of Procne and Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, and thereby allude ‘to rape, violation, and murder’ (Common Ground, 136-41). Jane de Gay considers the allusions to ‘Itylus’ alongside different versions of the Procne and Philomela myth (Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 205-7).

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first line of ‘Itylus’—‘“Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow”’—a line which he

repeats and modulates when Lucy joins him in his room.93 Probably reflecting Bart’s

perspective through free indirect discourse, Lucy is figured as a swallow: she

‘perched on the edge of a chair like a bird on a telegraph wire before starting for

Africa’.94 His murmuring the first line of Swinburne’s poem encourages the

identification of Lucy with Procne, who in the myth was transformed into a swallow

after her sister Philomena was raped by Tereus. In turn, as Marcus and de Gay point

out, the allusions to ‘Itylus’ echo the account of the rape of a girl by guardsmen,

which Isa reads in The Times, and which haunts her throughout the day.95 She reads

how the girl was dragged into a barrack room, before ‘one of the troopers removed

part of her clothing, and she screamed and hit him about the face’; at this point, the

door opens and ‘in came Mrs. Swithin carrying a hammer’.96 Lucy Swithin here

appears both as the victim of the rape story, but also as a revengeful figure. This latter

aspect complements her later depiction as Procne, who extracts revenge for her

sister’s rape by serving her husband their own son to eat.

The violent associations which surround swallows warrant circumspection for the

aeviternal nature depicted by the pageant. Lucy sees in the swallows a continuity of

nature, and her own figuration as a swallow places her in this order. However, as

Bart’s association of Lucy with Procne suggests, this supposedly natural order is one

of patriarchal aggression and rape. Just as much as the ‘natural and eternal law’ which

93 Woolf, Acts, 80, 84-5. 94 Woolf, Acts, 85. 95 See Marcus, Patriarchy, 93-4; de Gay, Literary Past, 205. As Stuart Clarke has shown, the rape about which Isa reads was a real case, which occurred on 27 April 1938, and was reported in The Times: see his ‘The Horse with a Green Tail’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 34 (Spring 1990), 3-4. See also Beer, Common Ground, 136-9, and Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 293-6. 96 Woolf, Acts, 15.

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fascists invoke to claim that man is essentially a fighter, the aeviternal continuity of

nature in Miss La Trobe’s pageant naturalises the patriarchal order and its incipient

violence.

Isa’s circumspect attitude to the idea of an aeviternal nature creates a further

ambivalence within the novel towards such a fiction. Unlike Lucy, Isa does not

embrace that fiction, and is not consoled by the continuity of nature. During one of

the pageant’s intervals, she picks a rose, and wanders through the gardens at Pointz

Hall. In one of her poetic reveries, she thinks of herself wandering where

there grows nothing for the eye. No rose. To issue where? In some harvestless dim field where no evening lets fall her mantle; nor sun rises. All's equal there. Unblowing, ungrowing are the roses there. Change is not; nor the mutable and lovable.97

The ‘harvestless dim field’ which she imagines displays the characteristics of the

aevum. In language which echoes that of the Mutabilitie Cantos, the field is depicted

as one where ‘[c]hange is not; nor the mutable’. It has a peculiar temporal character,

and is seemingly stuck in a state of stasis: ‘no evening lets fall her mantle’, and no

‘sun rises’, as if the dim field existed in a state of perpetual dusk.

Through its aeviternal stasis, Isa’s field resembles the Garden of Adonis (III.vi) in The

Faerie Queene. In her reading notes on Spenser’s poem, Woolf copied the following

lines which describe the Garden of Adonis: ‘There is continual Spring, & harvest

there/ Continual’, after which she wrote: ‘why this beauty?’98 These lines depict the

Garden of Adonis as one in which ‘Spring’ and ‘harvest’ coexist, both ‘meeting at one

tyme’, and moreover as one in which these seasons never pass but rather are 97 Woolf, Acts, 111-2. 98 Woolf, ‘Notebook XLV’, 15. More fully, the lines which Woolf quoted read: ‘There is continuall Spring, and harvest there/ Continuall, both meeting at one tyme’ (Spenser, Faerie, III.vi.42, in Works, ii, 458-9).

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‘continuall’. They reflect the garden’s aeviternity which, as a state that lies

somewhere between time and eternity, permits the coexistence of different times, and

the changeless existence of seasons. Isa’s ‘harvestless field’ both echoes and

modulates Spenser’s lines. That her field is ‘harvestless’ suggests a similarly

aeviternal state in which the passing of the seasons is suspended, but in contrast to the

Garden of Adonis where there is ‘harvest . . . Continuall’, Isa’s field is ‘harvestless’.

While the Garden of Adonis conveys nature’s fertility and generative power, Isa’s

field is one of sterility. In this respect, Isa’s field more closely resembles the Bower of

Bliss which Guyon and Palmer visit in the second book of The Faerie Queene, and

which stands as the sterile counterpart to the Garden of Adonis.

Whereas the Garden of Adonis celebrates the generative power of nature, and the

sexual union of Venus and Adonis, the Bower of Bliss poorly imitates nature, and is a

place of destructive and fruitless lust. The rose which Isa picks, and the ‘roses’ that

she imagines in her field, resonate with a song that is sung in the Bower of Bliss, the

following lines of which Woolf copied in her reading notes on The Faerie Queene:

So passeth, in the passing of a day, Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre, Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime, Gather the Rose of love whilest yet is time, Whilest loving thou mayst loved be with equall crime.99 In The Faerie Queene, this carpe diem song about gathering ‘the Rose of love’ before

it is too late is fittingly sung as Acrasia lies in a disheveled state on a ‘bed of Roses’,

having recently seduced a young knight, Verdant.100 However, in the wider context of

the canto, Acrasia’s love, and the Bower of Bliss more generally, are shams through 99 Woolf, ‘Notebook XLV’, 12; Spenser, Faerie, II.xii.75, in Works, ii, 329-30. Woolf omitted the third, fourth, fifth and seventh lines of the stanza. In one of her notes, Woolf expressed her preference for the ‘Bower of Bliss’ over other parts of the second book of The Faerie Queene, including the ‘fights’ and ‘[t]he history of Britain’ in II.x (12). 100 Spenser, Faerie, II.xii.77, in Works, ii, 330.

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which Guyon sees. Unlike the ‘goodly flowres’ which ‘dame Nature’ uses to beautify

the Garden of Adonis, flowers in the Bower of Bliss are artificial and gaudy.101 The

‘large and spacious plaine’ where the Bower is situated is adorned ‘too lavishly’ by

Art with flowers ‘as half in scorne/ Of niggard Nature’; their artifice is conveyed by

their description as ‘painted flowres’.102 The ‘roses’ of Isa’s field which are

‘ungrowing’ are like the painted, artificial flowers of the Bower of Bliss.

Exploring the intertextual echoes of The Faerie Queene in Between the Acts further, it

is significant that, while Isa pictures her harvestless field, Mrs Manresa is possibly

seducing her husband Giles in the greenhouse.103 Mrs Manresa becomes Acrasia, the

‘wanton Lady’ and ‘faire Enchauntresse’, and Giles plays the role of her ‘new Lover’,

a ‘young man’ whom she seduces.104 They are alone in the greenhouse which had

earlier been described as covered by a ‘vine’ with ‘little grapes’ and yellow leaves

that provide shade. The greenhouse is thereby an apt venue for their assignation, as it

is like the ‘Porch’ which serves as one of the gates to the Bower of Bliss, and which is

‘Archt over head with an embracing vine’, with ‘bounches hanging downe’.105 In

another allusion to The Faerie Queene, Mrs Manresa is later described as leading

Giles away at the end of the pageant ‘like a Goddess, buoyant, abundant, with flower-

chained captives following in her wake’.106 Her triumph is an ironic reversal of the

101 Spenser, Faerie, III.vi.30, in Works, ii, 454-5. 102 Spenser, Faerie, II.xii.50, 58, in Works, ii, 321, 324. 103 Isa is acutely aware of her husband’s possible infidelity: ‘Isa was immobile, watching her husband. She could feel the Manresa in his wake. She could hear in the dusk in their bedroom the usual explanation. It made no difference; his infidelity—but hers did’ (Acts, 80). Shortly after imagining the harvestless field, Isa discovers Giles and Mrs Manresa leaving the greenhouse together: ‘[t]he door was kicked open. Out came Mrs. Manresa and Giles. Unseen, Isa followed them across the lawns to the front row of seats’ (113). 104 Spenser, Faerie, II.xii.76, 81; 72, 79, in Works, ii, 330, 332; 329, 331. 105 Spenser, Faerie, II.xii.54, in Works, ii, 322. 106 Woolf, Acts, 145.

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ending of the episode which takes place in the Bower of Bliss, in which Arcasia and

her lover are enchained by Guyon and Palmer:

They tooke them both, and both them strongly bound In captive bandes, which there they readie found: But her in chaines of adamant he tyde.107 In The Faerie Queene, it is Arcasia the enchantress who is bound in ‘chaines’ and

‘captive bandes’, whereas in Between the Acts it is Mrs Manresa the seductress who

triumphs and ensnares Giles, and leads him away, a ‘flower-chained’ captive.

On the one hand, Isa’s imagination of a ‘dim harvestless field’, read alongside the

other allusions in Between the Acts to Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, provides a poetic

context for her husband’s possible infidelity with Mrs Manresa. Their meeting in the

greenhouse takes on the qualities of Arcasia’s seduction of Verdant in the Bower of

Bliss. This context is possibly a comforting one for Isa, insofar as it casts Mrs

Manresa in the role of the Arcasia the enchantress who uses her ‘sorceree/ And

witchcraft’ to seduce her ‘new Lover’ (Giles), who thereby becomes less culpable.108

However, on the other hand, the harvestless field also provides an image of aeviternal

nature as sterile and characterized by destructive and possibly violent lust. Shortly

before the door to the greenhouse is ‘kicked open’ and Giles and Mrs Manresa

emerge, Isa in her reverie thinks back to ‘the brawl in the barrack room when they

stripped her naked’.109 The juxtaposition of Giles and Mrs Manresa in the greenhouse

and the girl being raped in the barrack room suggests that the two situations might be

united by a common violence. Together, Isa’s image of the harvestless field, and the

other associations in the novel between swallows and rape, suggest the dangers of the 107 Spenser, Faerie, II.xii.82, in Works, ii, 332. 108 Spenser, Faerie, II.xii.72, in Works, ii, 329. 109 Woolf, Acts, 113.

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fiction of an aeviternal nature, and by extension, the dangers of timelessly naturalised

gender roles within a supposedly-changeless patriarchal order. However, while an

ambivalence in the novel is thereby created towards the fiction of an aeviternal nature

as regards gender, this is not the case with class.

Theatre, Epic and Bourgeois

The villagers in Miss La Trobe’s pageant are depicted as aeviternally perpetual, much

like the swallows which represent nature. A chorus of villagers appears throughout

the different historical ages represented by the pageant: ‘[l]ook, there’s the chorus, the

villagers, coming on now, between the trees’.110 They first appear in the opening

scene of the pageant which represents the very earliest days of England’s past, and

return in the Elizabethan, Restoration and Victorian scenes.111 They wind in and out

of the trees and sing songs, many of whose words get blown away by the wind.

The villagers sing of the fall of empires and world orders in history. At the end of the

Restoration comedy, they sing: ‘[p]alaces tumble adown [ . . . ] Babylon, Nineveh,

Troy . . . And Caesar's great house . . . all fallen they lie . . . Where the plover nests

was the arch. . . . through which the Romans trod’.112 The ephemerality of these once-

powerful empires is reflected in the fragility and transience of the song, which is only

semi-audible: ‘[t]he words died away. Only a few great names—Babylon, Nineveh,

110 Woolf, Acts, 115. It is fitting that the villagers who are depicted as aeviternal should appear as a chorus. As Kantorowicz points out, Aquinas conceived of the angels who subsist in the aevum as having a collective identity: ‘the immateriality of the angels did not allow the individuation of the species in matter, in a plurality of material individuals’ (Two Bodies, 282). 111 Woolf, Acts, 57, 90, 100, 115. 112 Woolf, Acts, 101.

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Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Troy—floated across the open space’.113 The image of

the plover nesting in the crumbling arch is one of the continuity of a nature which

persists beyond the rise and fall of civilizations. Its sentiment is similar to that

expressed by the sentence of Edgar Quinet, (inaccurately) copied by Léon

Metchnikoff, which echoes throughout James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1940):

Aujourd'hui comme aux temps de Pline et de Columelle la jacinthe se plaît dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance et pendant qu'autour d'elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de noms, que plusieurs sont entrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisibles générations ont traversé les âges et sont arrivées jusqu'à nous, fraîches et riantes comme aux jours des batailles.114

However, while the villagers sing of the fall of empires, they themselves take on a

type of permanence which resists the vicissitudes of history. They sing: ‘[s]ummer

and winter, autumn and spring return . . . All passes but we, all changes . . . but we

remain forever the same’.115 The villagers ‘remain forever the same’, living with the

seasons, immune from historical change, and to a large extent oblivious to it: ‘we see

only the clod’.116 Like the effect generated by swallows appearing in different scenes,

the fact that the same chorus returns throughout the different historical ages reinforces

the impression of the villagers’ changelessness throughout history. This continuity is

further extended to the present day by the fact that the villagers depicted in the

pageant are played by present-day villagers. In Miss La Trobe’s pageant, the villagers

are assimilated to nature against history, and take on an aeviternal changelessness,

much like that of Lucy’s swallows. 113 Woolf, Acts, 101. 114 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Finn Fordham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 281. In a letter of 22 November 1930 to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce wrote in summary of the ‘beautiful sentence from Edgar Quinet’: ‘E. Q. says that the wild flowers on the ruins of Carthage, Numancia etc have survived the political rises and falls of Empires’ (Letters of James Joyce, i, ed. Stuart Gilbert (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 295). As Inge Landuyt and Geert Lernout have shown, Joyce encountered Quinet’s sentence through Léon Metchnikoff’s La civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques (1889): see their ‘Joyce’s Sources: Les grands fleuves historiques’, Joyce Studies Annual, 6 (Summer 1995), 99-137. 115 Woolf, Acts, 100. 116 Woolf, Acts, 101.

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The assimilation of the villagers to an aeviternally changeless nature in Between the

Acts accords with Woolf’s imagination elsewhere of unchanging ‘peasants’. As well

as resembling the chorus in Greek drama, the chorus of villagers in Miss La Trobe’s

pageant are a dramatic equivalent to what Woolf saw as Thomas Hardy’s ‘eternal

peasants’.117 In her essay ‘Thomas Hardy’s Novels’, which was originally published

in the Times Literary Supplement on 19 January 1928, Woolf lauded Hardy’s

portrayal of ‘peasants’:

it is not the part of the peasants in the Wessex novels to stand out as individuals. They compose a pool of common wisdom, a fund of perpetual life. They comment upon the actions of the hero and heroine, but while Troy or Oak or Fanny or Bathsheba come in and out and pass away, Jan Coggan and Henry Fray and Joseph Poorgrass remain. They drink by night and they plough the fields by day. They are eternal.118

By not standing out ‘as individuals’, and by commenting ‘upon the actions of the hero

and heroine’, Hardy’s peasants play, for Woolf, a very similar role to that of the

chorus in drama, Greek or otherwise. Indeed, in her reading notes on Jude the

Obscure (1895), which she made in preparation for her essay on Hardy, she explicitly

wrote: ‘[p]easants used as chorus’.119

Unlike the heroes and heroines of his novels, who ‘come in and out and pass away’,

Hardy’s peasants are supposedly ‘eternal’, a ‘fund of perpetual life’. In part, their

eternal status reflects a common humour which persists unchanged throughout the

117 Cuddy-Keane has compared the chorus of villagers to the chorus in ancient Greek comedy (‘Politics’, 280). My suggestion complements the parallel that Peter Lowe draws between Woolf’s villagers who see ‘only the clod’, and Hardy’s poem ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’ (1915). He suggests that ‘[l]ike the “man harrowing clods”, and the maid in Thomas Hardy’s poem’, the villagers’ life in Miss La Trobe’s pageant ‘is a life that “will go onward the same/ Though Dynasties pass’ (‘Cultural Continuity in a Time of War: Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker”’, Yeats Eliot Review, 24/3 (Fall 2007), 2-19, 10). 118 Virginia Woolf, ‘Thomas Hardy’s Novels’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, iv, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), 507-19, 511. 119 Virginia Woolf, ‘Reading Notebook XLII’, Sussex, Monks House Papers, B.2j, 14.

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ages. They are portrayed as giving vent to their ‘half-poetic humour which has been

brewing in their brains and finding expression over their beer since the pilgrims

tramped the Pilgrims’ Way’.120 Yet Woolf also depicts the peasants as literally

eternal, as themselves persisting through the ages. For instance, she depicts Gabriel

Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) as an ‘eternal shepherd’ tending ‘his

sheep up there on the back of the world’: ‘the stars are ancient beacons; and for ages

he has watched beside his sheep’.121 Further, she associates the persistence of Hardy’s

peasants with the survival of the human race: ‘[t]he peasants are the great sanctuary of

sanity . . . the last stronghold of happiness. When they disappear, there is no hope for

the race’.122 By persisting unchanged throughout history, what Woolf depicts as the

‘eternal’ peasants of Hardy’s novels foreshadow her own use of a chorus of

unchanging villagers in the pageant of Between the Acts.

Woolf also expressed a similar view of unchanging ‘peasants’ in her correspondence.

In a letter of 26 June 1938, she wrote to Ethel Smyth of Hadrian’s Wall and the

Northumberland countryside which she visited with Leonard, and which inspired her

to think of ‘the immensity and tragedy and the sense of the Romans, and time, and

eternity’. She wrote of her experience of visiting Haughton Castle:

oh me! the river running and the old Castle, and the grass and the people—peasants, wandering along the bank, and talking to us, like something in the time of Elizabeth, so that I felt I was actually in Shakespeare.123

In this conceit, the ‘peasants’ appear as unchanged since ‘the time of Elizabeth’, and

thereby allow Woolf an imaginative return to Shakespeare and to the Elizabethan age.

120 Woolf, ‘Hardy’, 510-1. The idea of a common humour which persists over time foreshadows the anonymous tradition of song imagined by Woolf in ‘Anon’. 121 Woolf, ‘Hardy’, 510. 122 Woolf, ‘Hardy’, 511. 123 Letter to Ethel Smyth, 26 June 1938; The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume VI: 1936-1941, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), 246.

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In all these fictions, the enduring ‘peasants’—whether those of the chorus of Miss La

Trobe’s pageant, of Hardy’s novels, or of the Northumberland countryside—resist

change throughout history.

The portrayal of the villagers in Miss La Trobe’s pageant as aeviternal is deeply

problematic from a class perspective. We saw that, historically, the aevum carried a

politics of time through its application in the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies. By

enabling the distinction between the king’s ‘natural body’ and his ‘body politic’, the

concept of the aevum was employed to consolidate and entrench the monarch’s

position of power at the head of a feudal society. In Between the Acts, the fiction of

the aevum plays a similarly ideologically-suspect role. Here the aevum is employed

not to entrench the monarch’s position of power at the top of the class structure, as it

is in the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies, but rather to fix the working class in an

aeviternally-frozen state of subordination at the bottom of that structure. The chorus

of villagers who wear sacking cloth, plough the fields and tend the land according to

the seasons, are idealised as aeviternally changeless over history. Such a portrayal of

the working class is problematic because it petrifies the existing class-structure in an

unhistorical and changeless stasis, and thereby conceptually forecloses the possibility

of emancipatory political action.

It should be recognized that the pageant’s depiction of the working class as frozen in

an aeviternal stasis is in direct conflict with a Marxist view of history. In its most

general form, a Marxist view of history is one of ‘dialectical materialism’: it presents

history as the history of society, described in material terms of social and economic

conditions of production, as it changes according to the laws of dialectic. Marxist

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historiography resists the view that any one strata of society is unchanging or eternal.

It holds—contrary to countervailing interpretations of history—that the prevailing

social and economic conditions of production at any given time are not static and

changeless, but rather are inherently unstable, driven by dialectical contradictions.

Whereas Miss La Trobe’s pageant portrays the working class as aeviternally

permanent, dialectical materialism holds that nothing is exempt from change and

history, and particularly not the existing class structure and the dominance of the

ruling class. Correlatively, the pageant’s assimilation of the villagers to an aeviternal

order is diametrically opposed to Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, which is allied to a

Marxist theory of history.

The comparison drawn in this chapter between Miss La Trobe’s pageant in Between

the Acts and Mutabilitie’s pageant in The Faerie Queene, and the elucidation of the

role of the aevum as a temporal fiction, serves to challenge Brechtian readings of

Woolf’s pageant. Numerous critics have compared Miss La Trobe’s pageant to

Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre.124 These critics suggest that Miss La Trobe’s pageant

uses formal techniques which are very similar to Brecht’s ‘alienation effects’

(Verfremdungseffekte) which involve, as he put it, ‘taking the incidents portrayed and

alienating them from the spectator’ in order to ‘make the spectator adopt an attitude of

124 See Herbert Marder, ‘Alienation Effects: Dramatic Satire in Between the Acts’, Papers on Language and Literature, 24/4 (Fall 1988), 423-35; Catherine Wiley, ‘Making History Unrepeatable in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts’, Clio, 25/1 (Fall 1995), 3-20; Karin E. Westman, ‘History as Drama: Towards a Feminist Materialist Historiography’, in Diane F. Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankins (eds), Virginia Woolf and the Arts (New York: Pace University Press, 1997), 335-43; Georgia Johnston, ‘Class Performance in Between the Acts: Audiences for Miss La Trobe and Mrs. Manresa’, Woolf Studies Annual, 3 (1997), 61-75; Michael Tratner, ‘Why Isn’t Between the Acts a Movie?’, in Pamela L. Caughie (ed.), Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York: Garland, 2000), 115-34; Bahun, ‘Burden’, 105, 107-8; and Spiropoulou, Constellations, 151-3.

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inquiry and criticism in his approach to the incident’.125 For example, Catherine

Wiley suggests that Miss La Trobe’s pageant constitutes an ‘epic theatre piece’ which

‘succeeds in alienating its audience to the point of criticism’ by ‘using many of the

methods espoused by Brecht’. Specifically, she suggests that the cheap costumes and

unrealistic stage setting of Miss La Trobe’s pageant parallel Brecht’s use of alienation

effects ‘to portray the stage as an artificial and temporary environment’, and that the

acting parallels that of Brecht’s epic theatre, in which the actors ‘show the process of

acting out the character’.126

Critics such as Karin Westman, Georgia Johnston and Angeliki Spiropoulou have

used the analogy between Miss La Trobe’s pageant and Brecht’s epic theatre to

suggest that the pageant, and the novel more generally, advance a broadly Marxist

version of history. They thereby portray Woolf in a flatteringly politically-engaged

and class-conscious light. For Westman, the alienation effects of Miss La Trobe’s

pageant form part of Woolf’s supposed ‘feminist materialist historiography’, and her

‘materialist perspective upon the individual’s relationship to lived experience within

British patriarchal society’.127 Johnston argues that the central alienation effect of

Miss La Trobe’s pageant—reflecting the audience’s image back to themselves with

mirrors in the ‘Present Day’ scene—shows the audience ‘as participants in [the]

pageant of England’ rather than as ‘ahistorical’. She contends that this ‘alienation

effect’ deflects ‘acceptance of class victimization into an awareness of the historical

125 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect’ (1940/51), in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 2001), 136-47, 136. 126 Wiley, ‘Unrepeatable’, 6-8. Similarly, Spiropoulou notes that the ‘formal techniques’ of Miss La Trobe’s pageant are ‘strikingly reminiscent of Brecht’s famous Verfremdungseffekte’: ‘the villagers become actors, and any verisimilitude of scenery and costume is “outraged” to the extent that the latter destroys illusion’ (Constellations, 152). 127 Westman, ‘History as Drama’, 335.

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production that creates class construction’.128 Finally, Spiropoulou points out that

Brecht defined the alienation effect ‘in terms of dialectical materialism’, and holds

that the innovative formal techniques of Miss La Trobe’s pageant which so resemble

Brecht’s alienation effects achieve ‘a destruction of tradition’. Her invocation of

Brecht’s epic theatre thereby supports her wider argument that Woolf, like Benjamin,

temporalized history as the destruction of tradition.129

However, rather than champion Woolf as a quasi-Marxist, it is important to note the

marked disanalogies between Miss La Trobe’s pageant and Brecht’s epic theatre.

Although many elements of Miss La Trobe’s pageant superficially resemble the

alienation techniques of Brecht’s epic theatre, they operate in a completely

antithetical manner: they function unhistorically rather than historically.130 As Wiley,

Johnston and Spiropoulou all point out, Brecht aligned the alienation effects of epic

theatre with a Marxist theory of history.131 In ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’

(1948/1953), he claimed that the technique of alienating the familiar

allows the theatre to make use in its representations of the new social scientific method known as dialectical materialism. . . . It regards nothing as existing except in so far as it changes, in other words is in disharmony with itself.132

In ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’ (1936), he claimed that the alienation effect

in German epic theatre was ‘principally designed to historicize the incidents

128 Johnston, ‘Class Performance’, 69, 67, 72. 129 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 208, 151. 130 My argument complements Tratner’s contention that ‘[e]ven though Woolf creates . . . alienating effects [in Between the Acts], she still does not seem to do what ultimately Benjamin says is the goal of . . . [Brecht’s] epic theatre: to destroy completely the aura of art and tradition’ (‘Movie’, 125). More generally, I fully agree with Tratner’s argument that Between the Acts differs from Walter Benjamin’s views by remaining ‘respectful of previous traditions of art and even previous ages of the social order, as if something in those ages were worth preserving’ (124). 131 See Wiley, ‘Unrepeatable’, 6-7; Johnston, ‘Class Performance’, 67; Spiropoulou, Constellations, 208. 132 Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’, in Brecht on Theater, 179-205, 192.

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portrayed’, and was part of a new way of thinking: ‘the historical way’.133 In turn, by

prompting the audience to think historically, epic theatre aims to inspire its audience

to take political action: ‘[h]uman behaviour is shown as alterable; man himself as

dependent on certain political and economic factors and at the same time capable of

altering them’.134 The spectator of epic theatre is encouraged to adopt a critical

attitude towards the social conditions portrayed, and is prompted ‘to justify or abolish

these conditions according to which class he belongs’.135

In stark contrast to the historical nature of Brecht’s epic theatre, the villagers in Miss

La Trobe’s pageant are assimilated to an aeviternally permanent nature, and are

depicted as unchanging across history. Indeed, it should be stressed that what critics

have compared to Brecht’s alienation techniques actually serve to reinforce this

unhistorical view of the working class. For example, we have seen that both Wiley

and Spiropoulou compare the incomplete immersion of the village actors in their roles

to Brecht’s alienation techniques. However, in Miss La Trobe’s pageant, what Wiley

describes as the actors’ splicing their roles ‘onto their own identities’ does not, as in

Brecht’s epic theatre, serve to historicize the situations portrayed.136 On the contrary,

it reinforces the fiction of an aeviternal continuity by showing how similar the

present-day villagers are to their ancestors whose parts they play, and thereby

functions unhistorically.

Similarly, we have seen that both Wiley and Spiropoulou claim that the cheap

costumes used in Miss La Trobe’s pageant draw attention to the artificiality of the 133 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’, in Brecht on Theater, 91-9, 96. Compare Brecht’s explication of the ‘crucial technical device’ of ‘historicization’ in his ‘Short Description’, 140. 134 Bertolt Brecht, ‘On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre’, in Brecht on Theater, 84-90, 86. 135 Brecht, ‘Short Description’, 139. 136 Wiley, ‘Unrepeatable’, 8.

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performance, and thereby function like Brecht’s alienation effects. However, once

again, the clothes in the pageant function in a manner diametrically opposed to

Brecht’s alienation effects. The superficial change in costume between historical ages

serves to reveal what is supposedly a fundamentally unchanging human nature which

lies beneath. For example, the chorus of villagers appear in the opening scene of the

pageant dressed in ‘shirts made of sacking’, and later appear in the Victorian scene

dressed in ‘Victorian mantles’, yet sing of their fundamentally unchanging nature.137

Waiting for the actors to change costume between scenes, members of the audience

comment on the actors’ ‘dressing up’, and are led to discuss the question of ‘historical

change’:

[d]'you think people change? Their clothes, of course. . . . But I meant ourselves . . . Clearing out a cupboard, I found my father's old top hat. . . . But our selves—do we change?138

Lucy Swithin’s answer to this question is that people do not change. Complementing

her belief in aeviternal swallows, she subscribes to a radically unhistorical view of

human nature. Watching the pageant, she muses that she does not believe that ‘there

ever were such people’ as ‘[t]he Victorians’: ‘[o]nly you and me and William dressed

differently’. Summing up this unhistorical view, William responds: ‘[y]ou don’t

believe in history’.139 Rather than revealing the historical nature of the incidents

portrayed, clothes in the pageant instead affirm a belief in the changelessness of

people, and the unreality of history. Nor, if Lucy’s attitude is anything to go by, does

the pageant induce the socially-critical attitude that was the purpose of Brecht’s

alienation effects. Far from inspiring her to take revolutionary political action, the

pageant prompts her to muse ‘with her odd little smile’ on the constancy of human 137 Woolf, Acts, 57, 121. 138 Woolf, Acts, 88; her ellipses. 139 Woolf, Acts, 125.

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nature, just as it had earlier provided her with a reassuring view of the aeviternal

permanence of swallows.140

Far from resembling Brecht’s epic theatre, Miss La Trobe’s pageant is more like the

unhistorical ‘bourgeois theatre’ against which epic theatre is counter-defined. In

‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’, Brecht contrasted epic theatre, whose ‘A-

effect’ was ‘principally designed to historicize the incidents portrayed’, with

bourgeois theatre, which ‘emphasized the timelessness of its objects’. Bourgeois

theatre’s

representation of people is bound by the alleged “eternally human”. Its story is arranged in such a way as to create “universal” situations that allow Man with a capital M to express himself: man of every period. . . . This notion may allow that such a thing as history exists, but it is none the less unhistorical. A few circumstances vary, the environments are altered, but Man remains unchanged.141

This hostile characterization of bourgeois theatre’s unhistorical representation of

people is fulfilled remarkably well by Miss La Trobe’s pageant. The villagers who

persist unchanged through the ages of the pageant are like the ‘Man’ of bourgeois

theatre who is ‘eternally unchanged’.142 Their changing costumes, which serve to

reveal to Lucy the unchanging human nature that lies beneath, accord with Brecht’s

characterization of bourgeois theatre as one in which ‘[a] few circumstances vary . . .

but Man remains unchanged’. Correspondingly, the pageant’s fiction of an aeviternal

order underpins a conception of history much like that which sustains bourgeois

theatre: ‘such a thing as history exists, but it is none the less unhistorical’.143

140 Woolf, Acts, 125. 141 Brecht, ‘Alienation Effects’, 96-7. 142 Brecht, ‘Alienation Effects’, 97. 143 The pageant’s ‘unhistorical’ depiction of aeviternal continuity should be distinguished from the ‘denial of history’ which Lukácz saw as brought about by the supposed modernist exploration of a Bergsonian private time. Whereas the introspective turn into the realm of durée results in an obliviousness to history, and thereby constitutes a ‘denial of history’, the fiction of aeviternal

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Of course, the politics of time of the pageant should be distinguished from that of the

novel, and from that of Woolf’s personal conception of history. While Lucy

seemingly embraces the pageant’s portrayal of aeviternal villagers, Dodge’s remark to

her that ‘[y]ou don’t believe in history’ intimates that he does not necessarily share

her unhistorical view. Moreover, the pageant’s audience debates the question of the

changefulness or otherwise of human nature as an open question.

Nevertheless, the novel does not furnish a critical perspective on the pageant’s

depiction of aeviternal villagers. As we have seen, an ambivalent attitude within the

novel is created towards the fiction of aeviternal swallows by Mrs Manresa’s and

Isa’s sceptical responses to that fiction, and by the associations of swallows with rape.

By contrast, the novel provides no such critical perspective on the fiction of aeviternal

villagers. Moreover, this fiction is suspiciously similar to Woolf’s fantasies elsewhere

of ‘eternal peasants’. The fiction of an aeviternal nature in Between the Acts carries,

when it comes to class, a deeply suspect politics of time.

continuity in Miss La Trobe’s pageant corresponds to an acute awareness of history, albeit a history across which things persist aeviternally unchanged.

3.2 The Historical Time of Miss La Trobe’s Pageant

In Between the Acts (1941), Miss La Trobe’s village pageant is accompanied by an

historical time, whose passing is marked by the playing of a gramophone which lies

hidden in the bushes. The gramophone plays a wide range of music throughout the

pageant, including a ‘pompous popular tune’ which opens proceedings, a ‘dance

tune’, a ‘merry little old tune’, a selection of ‘London street cries’, a ‘pompous march

tune’, something which sounds like a ‘[f]ox-trot’ or ‘[j]azz’, something which could

be ‘Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart’, and the National Anthem.1 Music draws the

otherwise-distracted minds of the audience together like ‘filings magnetised’: the

‘whole population of the mind’s immeasurable profundity came flocking’.2 It also

helps to connect the various scenes of the historical pageant, and thereby facilitates a

sense of historical continuity.3

When the gramophone is not playing music, it is often heard making either a

mechanical chuffing sound, or ticking like a clock, and thereby marking the passing

of time: ‘[c]huff, chuff, chuff went the machine. Time was passing’.4 The ticking of

the gramophone, and more explicitly time itself, is several times described as holding

the audience together: ‘[t]ick, tick, tick, the machine continued. Time was passing.

The audience was wandering, dispersing. Only the tick tick of the gramophone held

them together’.5 Conversely, the gramophone registers the dispersal of the audience

during the intervals and at the end of the pageant, by playing the motif: ‘[d]ispersed

1 Woolf, Acts, 58, 60, 90, 113, 115, 131, 135, 140. 2 Woolf, Acts, 135. 3 See, for example, Woolf, Acts, 88. 4 Woolf, Acts, 109. Bart recognizes early in the pageant that the gramophone is ‘[m]arking time’ (60). 5 Woolf, Acts, 111; compare 109.

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are we’.6 As the last audience members drive away, the gramophone, seemingly

winding down, marks the end of the pageant: ‘[t]he gramophone gurgled Unity—

Dispersity. It gurgled Un . . . dis . . . And ceased’.7

The historical time of the pageant is far from being a version either of Henri

Bergson’s durée or of his clock-time. Rather, it more closely resembles Martin

Heidegger’s historicality (Geschichtlichkeit). In the introduction to this thesis, I

provided a short exposition of Heidegger’s concept of historicality, which is found in

Being and Time (1927). To recapitulate briefly, historicality is the form of temporality

which underpins both history and Dasein’s unity as a ‘stretching’ between birth and

death. Its central structure is that of ‘repetition’ (Wiederholung), through which the

three temporal ecstases are united. In authentic historicality, the members of a

community are brought together in an act of ‘co-historizing’, in which they repeat

past possibilities of existence. It was seen that Heidegger’s historicality contrasts with

Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit and is one of the competing forms of the temporalization

of history within modernity.

In this chapter, I will show how closely the historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant

resembles Heidegger’s historicality. In particular, I will suggest that the time of the

pageant and Heidegger’s historicality are alike in four main respects: by being

phenomenological, by being historical, by being communal and by being

characterized by repetition. Woolf would not have been aware of Heidegger’s account

of historicality in Being and Time. (Nor is there any evidence that Woolf read

Augustine’s account of a ‘time of the soul’ in his Confessions (398), which, as we

6 Woolf, Acts, 69-71, 141-2 7 Woolf, Acts, 144.

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shall see, stands as an important precursor to Heidegger’s historicality). Nevertheless,

Woolf’s literary imagination of a form of historical time in Between the Acts stands as

an analogue within literary modernism of Heidegger’s emblematic account of the

temporalization of history within modernity.

The historical time of the pageant marked by the ticking of the gramophone is distinct

from the fiction of the aevum, which was discussed in the previous chapter. As

Kermode makes clear, the aevum is an order of duration which is different from time:

it ‘does not abolish time’ but rather ‘co-exists with time’.8 Indeed, the aevum depicted

by Miss La Trobe’s pageant exists alongside the historical time marked by the

gramophone, just as the aevum co-exists with time in both The Faerie Queene and in

the scholastic philosophy from which the concept derives. Yet, while the aeviternal

nature and the historical time of the pageant are distinct, they are also complementary,

and together underpin a conception of history as continuity and tradition. Just as the

concept of the aevum is one of perdurance across history, so too, as we shall see, the

time of the pageant is one which supports a conception of history as the preservation

and continuation of tradition.

Phenomenological Time

The historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant is like Heidegger’s historicality in

being phenomenological. As Paul Ricoeur points out, Heidegger’s Being and Time

forms part of a phenomenological tradition of philosophical accounts of time, which

8 Kermode, Ending, 72.

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extends through Saint Augustine, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.9 The

most general characteristic of such accounts is that they treat time as a ‘time of the

soul’; by doing so, they contrast with what Ricoeur calls ‘cosmological’ accounts of

time, which treat time as a ‘time of the world’.10 Thus, Saint Augustine’s account of

time in the eleventh book of his Confessions (398) is a foundation of the

phenomenological tradition. Therein, through his account of the threefold present,

Augustine famously located time in the soul. He held that the past exists as ‘memory’,

the present exists as ‘immediate awareness’, and the future exists as ‘expectation’:

‘[i]n the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere

else’.11 Time passes, for Augustine, through an activity of the mind, which is

‘stretched’ between memory and expectation: what ‘the mind . . . expects passes

through what has its attention to what it remembers’, and so ‘present attention

transfers the future into the past’.12

Edmund Husserl also advanced a phenomenological account of time in his On the

Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928).13 In this work, which

acknowledges its debt to Augustine in its opening lines, Husserl gave an account of

the workings of ‘retention’, ‘primal sensation’, and ‘protention’. Through these,

consciousness constitutes both its own unity and appearance as a ‘flow’, and the unity

and appearance of its immanent objects as things extended in immanent time.14

9 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, iii, 4, 63. 10 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, iii, 4, 12. The phenomenological time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant contrasts with the geological time of H. G. Wells’s writing, which, as we saw above, is a form of cosmological time. 11 Saint Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 235. 12 Augustine, Confessions, 243. 13 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991). 14 Husserl, Phenomenology, 84-5, 89. Husserl wrote that the ‘first person who sensed profoundly the enormous difficulties inherent in [the analysis of time-consciousness] was Augustine’: ‘[e]ven today,

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Although he broke with Husserl’s broadly Cartesian conception of the mind,

Heidegger also offered a phenomenological account of time. As Ricoeur points out,

by seeking ‘in Care [Sorge] itself the principle of the pluralizing of time into future,

past and present’, Heidegger went beyond the Augustinian analysis of the threefold

present, and further than the Husserlian analysis of retention and protention, yet

remained ‘in the same phenomenological space’.15

The historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant is, like Heidegger’s historicality and

its precursors in the phenomenological tradition, a ‘time of the mind’. Initially, it

should be remarked that the conceit in Between the Acts of having music played on

the gramophone to convey the passing of time is comparable to the use of music in

Augustine’s Confessions and Husserl’s Phenomenology. Music and verse play a

prominent role throughout Augustine’s exploration of time. Most centrally, he uses

the example of singing or reciting a Psalm in his pivotal characterization of temporal

experience; he later returns to the example of a ‘person singing or listening to a song

he knows well’.16 Like Augustine, Husserl made extensive use of music in his

investigations of the consciousness of time, returning frequently to his central

‘example of a melody’.17 Woolf’s use of music played mechanically on a gramophone

stands as a particularly modern literary analogue to Augustine’s and Husserl’s

philosophical explorations of time.

anyone occupied with the problem of time must still study Chapters 14-28 of Book XI of the Confessions thoroughly. For in these matters our modern age, so proud of its knowledge, has failed to surpass or even to match the splendid achievement of this great thinker who grappled so earnestly with the problem of time’ (3). 15 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, iii, 68. 16 Augustine, Confessions, 243, 245. The example of reciting a Psalm joins together what Ricoeur identifies as the two most important components of Augustine’s exploration of time: the account of the threefold present, and the characterization of the mind as a distension. The conception of ‘the threefold present as distension and distension as the distension of the threefold present’ constitutes, according to Ricoeur, Augustine’s ‘stroke of genius’, in the wake of which ‘will follow Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’ (Time and Narrative, i, 19-20, 16). 17 Husserl, Phenomenology, 24.

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It becomes particularly evident in the culminating ‘Present Day’ scene of Miss La

Trobe’s pageant that the time of the pageant is a time of the mind. The scene is one of

disorder and uncertainty. The present is one of fragmentation, as actors bring mirrors,

tin cans and jars onto the stage to reflect the audience’s broken image back to them.

The past is one of disorder, as actors from previous scenes of the pageant,

representing different periods from English history, wander on stage and chaotically

declaim various lines from their parts. The future is uncertain, as an anonymous

megaphonic voice asks the audience how the wall of civilization is to be rebuilt by

‘orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves?’18 Against this scene of temporal disorder

and confusion, the anonymous voice exhorts: ‘[a]ll you can see of your selves is

scraps, orts and fragments? Well then listen to the gramophone affirming . . .’19 Music

plays on the gramophone:

Like quicksilver sliding, filings magnetised, the distracted united. The tune began; the first note meant a second; the second a third. Then down beneath a force was born in opposition; then another. On different levels they diverged. . . . The whole population of the mind's immeasurable profundity came flocking; from the unprotected, the unskinned; and dawn rose; and azure; from chaos and cacophony measure; but not the melody of surface sound alone controlled it; but also the warring battle-plumed warriors straining asunder: To part? No. Compelled from the ends of the horizon; recalled from the edge of appalling crevasses; they crashed; solved; united.20

Given that the gramophone has throughout the pageant marked time, the portrayal of

the mind being drawn together as it listens to music—the ‘whole population of the

mind’s immeasurable profundity came flocking’—suggests a phenomenological time

of the mind.21

18 Woolf, Acts, 135. 19 Woolf, Acts, 135. 20 Woolf, Acts, 135-6. 21 In the passage quoted, it is indeterminate whether ‘the mind’ is that of an individual or of a group. Below, I will address the latter interpretation, and the communal aspects of this temporality.

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The focussing of the previously-distracted minds of the audience parallels accounts of

the mind being drawn together in acts of temporalization in the phenomenological

tradition. Augustine gave a characterization of the mind’s ‘attention [attentio]’,

through which ‘the future is transferred to become the past’. He contrasted such

‘concentration [intentionem]’ to the ‘multiplicity of distractions’ in which ‘us the

many’ usually live.22 Similarly, Heidegger portrayed the stance of authentic

historicality as one of the ‘Self’s resoluteness against the inconstancy of distraction’.23

The drawing together of the audience’s minds in Between the Acts, in which the

contents of the mind ‘came flocking’ and ‘the distracted united’, parallels Augustine’s

description of the mind being brought from a ‘multiplicity of distractions’ to a state of

concentration, and Heidegger’s description of Dasein’s pulling itself together from a

state of distraction into a stance of authentic historicality.24

In Woolf’s novel, the similes of the distracted mind uniting like ‘quicksilver sliding’

and like ‘filings magnetised’ are spatial ways of figuring the mind, which parallel

phenomenological characterizations of the stretching or distention of the mind.

Heidegger characterized historicality as that through which Dasein ‘stretches along

between birth and death’; in doing so he was, as Ricoeur points out, echoing

Augustine’s account of the distention of the mind.25 Augustine had held, for instance,

that in the case of reciting a Psalm, the ‘life of this act of mine is stretched two ways,

into my memory . . . and into my expectation’.26 Just as the mind listening to music in

22 Augustine, Confessions, 243, 245. 23 Heidegger, Being and Time, 442. 24 Elsewhere in the novel, Miss La Trobe repeatedly calls for music to be played to gain the attention of the audience, which is prone to wander (see, for example, Woolf, Acts, 88). The Rev. Streatfield remarks in his concluding speech that ‘as the play or pageant proceeded, my attention was distracted’ (138). 25 Heidegger, Being and Time, 425. As Ricoeur points out, with this stretching along ‘[w]e could not find ourselves any closer to Augustine’ (Time and Narrative, iii, 72). 26 Augustine, Confessions, 243, emphasis added.

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Between the Acts is spread out like iron filings in a magnetic field, so too, for

Augustine, temporal experience is that of the mind spatially figured as stretched

between memory and expectation.

The stretching which is central to both Augustine’s and Heidegger’s accounts of

temporality results in what Ricoeur identifies as the central animating tension of both:

that between ‘discordance’ and ‘concordance’. For Augustine, the discordance of the

distentio, or the stretching of the mind between memory and expectation, and the

concordance of the intentio, or the unifying act of attention of the mind, are united in

a reciprocal relationship, as the former constantly arises from the latter. As Ricoeur

puts it, ‘the more the mind makes itself intentio, the more it suffers distentio’, and so

Augustine ‘sees discordance emerge again and again out of the very concordance of

the intentions of expectation, attention and memory’.27 For Heidegger, the

discordance of Dasein’s ‘stretching along’ contrasts with the concordance of

repetition; as Ricoeur points out, this contrast ‘coincides exactly with the Augustinian

dialectic of distentio and intentio’.28 A very similar tension arises in the mind as it

listens to music in Between the Acts. Music draws the mind together in an act of

attention, in which the ‘distracted united’: from ‘chaos and cacophony’ came

‘measure’. However, this unity is threatened: ‘a force was born in opposition’, and the

mind is driven by ‘the warring battle-plumed warriors straining asunder’. This tension

between order and disorder is reflected in the ‘Unity—Dispersity’ motif which is

played by the gramophone, and which echoes throughout the novel.29

27 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 21 28 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, iii, 76. 29 Woolf, Acts, 144. As we will see below, the ‘Unity—Dispersity’ motif also marks the coming together and separating of the audience as a community.

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Expectation is central to phenomenological accounts of time, whether in the guise of

Heidegger’s ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, Husserl’s ‘protention’ or Augustine’s

‘expectation’. For example, for Augustine, the future exists ‘in the mind’ as

‘expectation’. In his example of the Psalm, time passes as words which were expected

become transferred to memory.30 Husserl similarly explores what he provisionally

called ‘anticipatory expectation’ in ‘the example of a melody’: ‘the first tone sounds,

then comes the second tone, then the third, and so on’.31 Similarly, expectation plays

an important role in the historical time of Woolf’s novel. The drawing together of the

mind listening to music includes an expectation of the future, as each note of the

‘tune’ brings the expectation of the next: ‘[t]he tune began; the first note meant a

second; the second a third’. Earlier in the novel, the playing of a repeating scale had

been linked with expectation of the future. As Isa and William Dodge sit in the

greenhouse under the vine leaves, the

future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern. They had left the greenhouse door open, and now music came through it. A.B.C., A.B.C., A.B.C.—someone was practising scales.32

Expectation here extends onto the historical plane. As Gillian Beer points out, the

‘criss-cross of lines making no pattern’ suggests the play of searchlights, and thereby

foreshadows the imminent Blitz.33 The future which shadows Isa and Dodge’s present

is a future disturbed by imminent war. More generally, war colours expectation of the

30 Augustine, Confessions, 243. More precisely, for Augustine, the ‘present considering the future is expectation’ (235). 31 Husserl, Phenomenology, 24-5. What Husserl here provisionally calls ‘anticipatory expectation’ corresponds to what he later conceived of as ‘protention’, which is that by which ‘I am directed towards what is coming’ (122). 32 Woolf, Acts, 83. 33 Beer, Common Ground, 126.

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future in Between the Acts. Isa is acutely conscious of ‘[t]he future disturbing our

present’, as is Dodge of ‘[t]he doom of sudden death hanging over us’.34

It is worth emphasizing that the time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant is, like Heidegger’s

historicality, a historical time. For Heidegger, historicality is the form of

temporalization which both unites individual lives, and underpins history as whole.

(In this, Heidegger’s historicality was intriguingly anticipated by Augustine, who

suggested that his account of the temporal experience involved in reciting a Psalm

was ‘also valid of the entire life of an individual person’, and of ‘the total history of

“the sons of men”’).35 Heidegger’s account of historicality is both an account of the

unity of the individual life—of how Dasein ‘stretches along between birth and death’

and maintains itself constantly in a ‘connectedness of life’—and an account of history

which is ‘rooted in temporality’.36 Dasein, Heidegger argued, ‘exists historically and

can so exist only because it is temporal in the very basis of its Being’.37

Heidegger’s contention that historicality is ‘rooted in temporality’ forms a point of

comparison with Between the Acts. Just as Heidegger’s historicality connects both

34 Woolf, Acts, 60, 83. 35 Augustine, Confessions, 243. Explaining how a theory of time which locates time in the mind can account for historical time, which by its nature extends beyond the reach of individual memory, became a major concern for early twentieth-century phenomenological philosophy. Husserl distinguished ‘recollection’ from ‘retention’, and on that basis conceived of a ‘pseudo-present’ which can be extended back in time. He writes that this ‘process must evidently be conceived as capable of being continued without limit, although in practice the actual memory will soon fail’ (Phenomenology, 72). As Ricoeur comments, ‘[t]his statement is of the highest interest for the shift from the time of remembrance to historical time, which goes beyond the memory of each individual’ (Time and Narrative, iii, 39). While rejecting Heidegger’s conception of historicality, Merleau-Ponty pointed the way to a conception of historical time in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945) with his comment that ‘my living present’ can ‘open on to temporalities outside my living experience and acquire a social horizon, with the result that my world is expanded to the dimensions of . . . collective history’. He also boldly denied the coherence of any conception of historical time in a world without or before consciousness (Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 496-7, 502-3). Ricoeur characterized his three volume Time and Narrative as an expansion of Augustine’s intriguing but undeveloped suggestions (Time and Narrative, i, 22). 36 Heidegger, Being and Time, 425, 428, his emphasis. 37 Heidegger, Being and Time, 428, his emphasis.

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individual lives and history, so the phenomenological time of the pageant promises to

hold together both the lives of the audience members, and the entire stretch of history

depicted by the pageant. Music brings together the minds of the audience, and thereby

promises to unify lives which might otherwise appear fragmented. The gramophone

affirms a sense of unity when otherwise, as the megaphonic voice puts it, ‘[a]ll you

can see of your selves is scraps, orts and fragments’.38 Again, the time marked by the

gramophone promises to tie together the historical scenes of the pageant as a coherent

whole, and thereby underpins the scheme of English history presented by the pageant.

Time and Community

The time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant and Heidegger’s historicality are alike in being

communal forms of temporality. Heidegger aligned inauthentic and authentic forms of

historicality with different types of community. Inauthentic historicality is the normal

state of affairs, in which ‘the Self is lost in the “they” (das Man)’.39 By contrast,

authentic historicality ‘weans one from the conventionalities of the “they” (das Man)’

and draws Dasein together in an authentic form of community:

if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with-Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny. This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people.40

Authentic historicality is essentially communal: it is done together as a ‘co-

historizing’, or the ‘historizing of the community’. It binds Dasein together in an

38 Woolf, Acts, 135. Mrs Manresa’s ‘life history’ had previously been described as ‘only scraps and fragments’ (29). 39 Heidegger, Being and Time, 435. 40 Heidegger, Being and Time, 443-4, 436, emphasis removed.

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authentic form of ‘Being-with-Others’, which contrasts with the ‘everyday Being-

with (Mitsein)’ that unites the inauthentic community of das Man.41

Between the Acts has long been read, and celebrated, as a novel about community. It

is widely recognized that Miss La Trobe’s pageant brings together a community at

Pointz Hall at a time of historical uncertainty.42 Indeed, Woolf intended to write about

community from a very early stage in the novel’s genesis, as is evident from the

much-quoted sketch of her ‘new book’ in her diary: ‘“I” rejected: “We” substituted’.43

However, what needs to be stressed is the important role that historical time plays in

the formation of the community envisaged in the novel. The gramophone, which

marks the passing of time, is repeatedly described as holding the audience together.

At the beginning of the play, the ‘tick, tick, tick’ of the gramophone needle ‘seemed

to hold them together, tranced’.44 Again, the ticking of the gramophone binds together

the audience, who otherwise threaten to wander and disperse:

Tick, tick, tick, the machine continued. Time was passing. The audience was wandering, dispersing. Only the tick tick of the gramophone held them together.45

More explicitly, it is ‘time’ which holds together the audience: ‘[c]huff, chuff, chuff

went the machine. Time was passing. How long would time hold them together?’46

This ‘time’ which holds the audience members together as a community, however

precariously, is much like the temporality of Heidegger’s authentic historicality,

which binds together ‘the community’ in an act of ‘co-historizing’.

41 See Heidegger, Being and Time, 156, 159, 164-8. 42 For example, Silver sees Between the Acts as an exploration of ‘the possibility of community and its survival on the eve of World War II’ (‘Community’, 295); Cuddy-Keane similarly suggests that in this novel Woolf ‘may have been sketching out a new model of society’ (‘Politics’, 274); and Esty portrays Between the Acts as a ‘confrontation with national community’ (Shrinking Island, 87). 43 See Woolf’s diary entry for 26 April 1938; Diary, v, 135. 44 Woolf, Acts, 60. 45 Woolf, Acts, 111. 46 Woolf, Acts, 109, emphasis added.

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In Woolf’s novel, the coming together and separating of the audience is marked by

the ‘Unity—Dispersity’ motif played on the gramophone.47 The gramophone marks

the audience’s dispersal at an interval: ‘[t]he music chanted: Dispersed are we. It

moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting

the grass with colour, across the lawn, and down the paths’.48 Music also summons

the audience together after the interval: ‘[t]he audience was assembling. The music

was summoning them. Down the paths, across the lawns they were streaming

again’.49 The coming together and dispersal of the audience parallels the observations

that Woolf made in her diary about the waxing and waning of communal feeling in

the light of war: ‘then there comes too the community feeling: all England thinking

the same thing—this horror of war—at the same moment. Never felt it so strong

before’.50 Again, she described how the ‘common feeling covers the private, then

recedes’.51 The coming together of the audience in Between the Acts also parallels

Heidegger’s characterization of the coming together of a community from a state of

‘dispersal’ in authentic historicality.

For Heidegger, everyday Dasein has ‘been dispersed into the many kinds of things

which daily “come to pass”’, and is ‘driven about by its “affairs”’.52 Authentic

historicality offers a way of Dasein coming ‘to itself’: ‘it must first pull itself together

from the dispersion and disconnectedness of the very things that have “come to

47 Woolf, Acts, 144. 48 Woolf, Acts, 69-70. Fittingly, the gramophone ‘petered out on the last word “we”’ to mark the complete dissolution of the audience as a community at the end of the pageant (71). 49 Woolf, Acts, 86. 50 Diary entry for 15 April 1939; Woolf, Diary, v, 215. 51 Diary entry for 25 August 1939; Woolf, Diary, v, 231. 52 Heidegger, Being and Time, 441.

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pass”’.53 The gramophone in Between the Acts similarly draws the audience together

from a state of dispersal. The apotheosis of community is brought about by the

playing of the music, and the coming together of the minds of the audience like

‘filings magnetised’, which not only unifies the individual minds of the audience in an

act of attention, but also draws them together as a community.54 After this intense and

rapturous communal moment, the Rev. Streatfield’s speech comes as a shock,

reminding the audience that they are not just a community, but also a collection of

individuals: ‘[m]ust I be Thomas, you Jane?’55

It should be emphasized that by its communal and historical nature, the time of Miss

La Trobe’s pageant contrasts starkly with Henri Bergson’s durée. It was seen in the

introduction to this thesis that Bergson, in his Essai sur les données immédiates de la

conscience (1889), advocated an introspective retreat from the ‘automated, external

world’ into the realm of durée.56 The time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant is a time of the

mind, but unlike Bergson’s durée, it does not involve an asocial retreat into the self.

Rather, it is a communal time that holds the pageant’s audience together as a group.

Nor does it involve a flight from history into the private sphere of consciousness.

Rather, it connects history together for the pageant’s audience in a shared historical

vision. By flagging the differences between the historical time of the pageant and

Bergson’s durée, I aim to challenge Bergsonian readings of time in Woolf and in

modernism more generally. For example, my interpretation of the time of the pageant

both opposes John Batchelor’s suggestion that ‘the chuff, chuff, chuff of the

gramophone’ marks the coming together of ‘clock time’ and ‘mind time’ in the

53 Heidegger, Being and Time, 441-2, his emphasis. 54 Woolf, Acts, 135. 55 Woolf, Acts, 136. 56 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 231-3.

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moment, and brings into question György Lukács’s influential view of modernist time

as asocial and as complicit in a denial of history.57

Repetition in History

A final point of comparison between the historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant

and Heidegger’s historicality concerns repetition. As has been seen above, a key

aspect of Heidegger’s account of historicality is repetition (Wiederholung), which is

the temporal structure in which Dasein hands down to itself possibilities that have

been.58 Repetition is given value by Heidegger as a feature of authentic historicality.

Indeed, das Man, whose existence is inauthentically historical, ‘cannot repeat what

has been’, and so is ‘loaded down with the legacy of a “past” which has become

unrecognizable’.59 By contrast, authentically historical Dasein ‘understands history as

the “recurrence” of the possible’.60 As Ricoeur puts it, repetition in history is not, for

Heidegger, the stale repetition of past possibilities of being, but rather ‘opens

potentialities that went unnoticed, were aborted, or were repressed in the past’.61

The historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant is marked by a similar form of

repetition to that portrayed by Heidegger.62 To a limited extent, the pageant offers a

57 John Batchelor, Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 135; Lukács, Realism, 37-9. 58 Heidegger, Being and Time, 437. 59 Heidegger, Being and Time, 443-4. 60 Heidegger, Being and Time, 444. 61 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, iii, 76. 62 Critics have previously noted the importance of repetition in Between the Acts, and have approached it from a variety of different critical perspectives. For example, John Whittier-Ferguson identifies repetition as a defining feature of Between the Acts and a hallmark of Woolf’s late style more generally, and connects it to the ‘sociopolitical catastrophe of a second world war’ (‘Repetition, Remembering, Repetition: Virginia Woolf’s Late Fiction and the Return of War’, Modern Fiction Studies, 57/2 (Summer 2011), 230-53, 231). J. Hillis Miller addresses repetition in Between the Acts

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positive sense of repetition. Heidegger portrayed the ‘authentic repetition of a

possibility of existence that has been’ as ‘the possibility that Dasein may choose its

hero’.63 Lucy responds to the historical pageant in a very similar manner, thanking

Miss La Trobe: ‘[w]hat a small part I’ve had to play! But you’ve made me feel that I

could have played . . . Cleopatra!’ Miss La Trobe translates for her: ‘[y]ou’ve stirred

in me my unacted part’.64 On the one hand, Lucy’s feeling, which she is barely able to

articulate, forms part of her whimsical mystical ‘one-making’, for which she is

soundly mocked.65 Yet, on the other hand, her feeling that she could have played

Cleopatra is an awareness of other parts or roles in history that she could have played,

or what Heidegger would call previous ‘possibilities of being’. Just as Heidegger’s

repetition offers Dasein the possibility to return to the past and ‘choose its hero’, so

Miss La Trobe’s historical pageant inspires Lucy to return to the past and choose her

hero: Cleopatra.

However, although it offers Lucy an inspiring experience, the repetitive temporality

of Between the Acts is otherwise sinister. The ticking of the gramophone needle

suggests a repetitiveness within historical time, yet this repetitive ticking holds violent

connotations. It echoes Lucy’s hammering of nails into the barn door, which Isa

associates with the story of the rape of a girl by guardsmen.66 Further intimations that

history forms a pattern of violent repetition run throughout the novel.67 For example,

Bart remarks in conversation in the opening scene of the novel that:

through Gilles Deleuze’s contrast between ‘Platonic repetition’ and ‘creative repetition’ (Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 5-6, 203-32. 63 Heidegger, Being and Time, 437. 64 Woolf, Acts, 110. 65 Woolf, Acts, 125-6. 66 Woolf, Acts, 15. 67 Wiley suggests that the ‘collective vision played out in Between the Acts asks both audience and reader to imagine the radical possibility of how we can stop history from repeating itself as war’ (‘Unrepeatable’, 3).

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[f]rom an aeroplane . . . you could still see, plainly marked, the scars made by the Britons; by the Romans; by the Elizabethan manor house; and by the plough, when they ploughed the hill to grow wheat in the Napoleonic wars.68

The ‘scars’ left on the landscape suggest the violence inflicted by successive peoples

over the course of English history. Scars have been left not only by ‘the Britons’, then

by their imperial Roman aggressors, but more recently from ‘when they ploughed the

hill to grow wheat in the Napoleonic wars’. Moreover, the repetitive pattern of war

seems likely to continue into the future. The landscape around Pointz Hall is

threatened by further scarring, as Giles is acutely aware: ‘[a]t any moment guns

would rake that land into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster into smithereens

and blast the Folly’.69

As Madelyn Detloff points out, the ending of the novel, in which Isa and Giles are

seemingly transposed back to prehistoric times where they ‘must fight’ then

‘embrace’, from which ‘another life might be born’, raises the prospect of a repetition

of history.70 As she puts it, when ‘the curtain rises on the new scene that ends the

novel, history may be set in motion to repeat itself’.71 Such a possibility of historical

repetition has been variously interpreted. Christine Froula is among the critics who

offer an optimistic interpretation of the ending. She suggests that the prospect of a

new child keeps ‘an unforeseeable future in play’.72 By contrast, Judith Johnston

advances a more pessimistic reading. For her, even if ‘another life might be born’, the

reader cannot expect that a third child fathered by Giles and grandfathered by Bart

68 Woolf, Acts, 3. 69 Woolf, Acts, 39. 70 Woolf, Acts, 157. 71 Madelyn Detloff, ‘Thinking Peace into Existence: The Spectacle of History in Between the Acts’, Women’s Studies, 28/4 (1999), 403-33, 428. 72 Froula, Civilization, 318.

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will transform the old story of patriarchal domination and violence.73 Johnston’s

pessimistic interpretation is supported by an earlier draft of the ending, in which it is

held that Isa and Giles would ‘fight’ and ‘embrace’ as ‘the moth quivering its red, its

orange, lets fall a shower of eggs’.74 This image is one of fertility, but also of

destruction, as the moth letting fall a shower of eggs resembles an aircraft letting fall

a shower of bombs. It thereby foreshadows the Blitz which is imminent on the June

day in 1939. The image suggests that the propagation of children into a patriarchal

society is set to reinforce the continual recurrence of war.

The violent aspect of the repetitive historical temporality of the pageant can be

elucidated by reading the novel alongside other of Woolf’s late writings. In Three

Guineas (1938), history is characterised as a constant repetition of patriarchal

violence and war. It is portrayed as a repetitive series of battles, not only military, but

also those fought by ‘the patriarchal system’ against its ‘victims’, such as the ‘battle

of the universities’ which was fought to deny women a university education.75 ‘It

seems’, writes Woolf’s narrator, ‘as if there were no progress in the human race, but

only repetition’.76 In a conceit whose images resonate with those of Between the Acts,

the narrator writes:

[i]f we encourage the daughters to enter the professions without making any conditions as to the way in which the professions are to be practised shall we not be doing our best to stereotype the old tune which human nature, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is now grinding out with such disastrous unanimity? ‘Here we go round the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree, the

73 Judith L. Johnston, ‘The Remediable Flaw: Revisioning Cultural History in Between the Acts’, in Jane Marcus (ed.), Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centennial Celebration (London: Macmillan, 1987), 253-77, 273. 74 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Earlier Typescript’, in Pointz Hall, 31-189, 184-5. 75 Woolf, Guineas, 245-6. The daughters of educated men have, Woolf’s narrator points out, ‘been shut out of the universities so repeatedly’ (280). 76 Woolf, Guineas, 248-9.

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mulberry tree. Give it all to me, give it all to me, all to me. Three hundred millions spent upon war.’77

The gramophone, whose needle has stuck, marks a constant repetition of patriarchal

wars in history. History for Woolf is not, as Beer suggests, ‘playful, a spume of

language’.78 Rather, with its incessant repetition of wars waged by a violent

patriarchal order, history is more like the ‘nightmare’ from which Stephen, in James

Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), is ‘trying to awake’.79

Woolf’s exemplary figure for the historical condition explored in Three Guineas is

Antigone. The repetition of war and the subjugation of women is dramatised in an

imaginative return to the (fictional) past of Sophocles’s Antigone:

Creon said: ‘I will take her where the path is loneliest, and hide her, living, in a rocky vault.’ And he shut her not in Holloway or in a concentration camp, but in a tomb. And Creon we read brought ruin on his house, and scattered the land with the bodies of the dead. It seems, Sir, as we listen to the voices of the past, as if we were looking at the photographs again, at the picture of dead bodies and ruined houses that the Spanish Government sends us almost weekly. Things repeat themselves it seems. Pictures and voices are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago.80

This imaginative return to ‘the past’ sets up a parallel between the events of Antigone

and the present day.81 Women—who have previously been described as shut up in the

private house ‘like slaves in a harem’, as well as shut out from the professions, from

the universities, and from religious institutions—are comparable to Antigone, who

was buried alive in a rocky vault by her father, Creon.82 And just as Creon ‘brought

ruin on his house, and scattered the land with the bodies of the dead’, so too, having

77 Woolf, Guineas, 238. Returning to this conceit, Woolf’s narrator again stresses the imperative not to ‘follow and repeat and score still deeper the old worn ruts in which society, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is grinding out with intolerable unanimity “Three hundred millions spent upon arms”’ (308). 78 Beer, Common Ground, 8. 79 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 34. 80 Woolf, Guineas, 363. 81 Woolf, Guineas, 362. 82 Woolf, Guineas, 261.

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shut out women from society, wars such as the Spanish Civil War inevitably arise:

‘[t]hings repeat themselves it seems’.

Woolf also portrayed history in terms of repetition in her diary and correspondence.

In her diary, she presented the prospect of a second world war as the repetition of that

of 1914: ‘[a] single step—in Cheko Slovakia—like the Austrian Archduke in 1914 &

again [it is] 1914’.83 Again, she wrote that ‘the whole of Europe may be up in flames .

. . One more shot at a policeman & the Germans, Czecks, French will begin the old

horror’.84 She recorded a similar sense of the unbearable repetition of history in a

letter to Lady Shena Simon: ‘[t]he human race seems to repeat itself insufferably’.85

Overall, whereas Heidegger saw in repetition the possibility of an authentic form of

historicality, and the handing down of a heritage from the past, Woolf portrayed

history in terms of a very different form of repetition: the nightmarish repetition of

violent acts committed by patriarchal society.

For Augustine, the condition of being in time is, ultimately, one of suffering. The

distension of the soul is portrayed as painful, as if the soul were being stretched on a

rack. He characterised the temporal experience of singing or listening to a song as

suffering: ‘[a] person singing or listening to a song he knows well suffers a distension

or stretching [variatur affectus sensusque distenditur]’.86 Similarly, he described his

life as ‘a distension in several directions [distentio est vita mea]’, as ‘stretched out in

distraction’ and ‘pulled apart’: ‘I am scattered in times whose order I do not

understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost

83 Diary entry for 28 August 1938; Woolf, Diary, v, 164. 84 Diary entry for 24 May 1938; Woolf, Diary, v, 142. 85 Letter to Lady Shena Simon, 25 January 1941; Letters, vi, 464. 86 Augustine, Confessions, 245.

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entrails of my soul [intima viscera animae meae]’.87 The painfulness of the distension

of the soul is exacerbated, for Augustine, by the contrast between time and eternity,

and the fact that being in time distances man from God, and the stillness of his

eternity. As Ricoeur puts it, the distentio animi comes to express ‘the way in which

the soul, deprived of the stillness of the eternal present, is torn asunder’.88

A similar theological contrast between time and eternity animates T. S. Eliot’s Four

Quartets (1936-42). In ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936), there is a lament for the condition of

being in time which echoes Augustine’s Confessions, and the account of time found

therein:

Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness.89

Eliot here echoes Augustine, for whom words and music are a painful reminder of the

condition of being in time, the difference between temporal words and the eternal

Word, and of man’s distance from the stillness of God’s eternity.90

Locally, Beer points out in her edition of Between the Acts that Eliot’s Chinese jar

finds an echo in Woolf’s novel, with the vase that stands in the heart of the house, and

holds ‘the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence’.91 More broadly, Woolf in this

87 Augustine, Confessions, 243-4. 88 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 27. 89 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909—1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 181-2. 90 See Augustine, Confessions, 61-2, 243-5. For a reading of ‘Burnt Norton’ in the context of Augustine’s account of time and memory in Book XI of the Confessions, see Paul Murray, T. S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of ‘Four Quartets’ (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1991), 45-9. 91 Woolf, Acts, 27; Gillian Beer, ‘Introduction’, in Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. Gillian Beer (London: Penguin, 1992), ix-xxxv, xxvii, 134.

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novel imagined her own version of an historical time which is like that of Augustine

by being a time in the mind. However, her imagination of such a time is not set within

the theological contrast between time and eternity that animates Augustine’s

Confessions and Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, and is not marked by their theological lament

of being far from God’s eternity. Rather, if Woolf’s historical time has a painful

aspect, it arises through the repetition of patriarchal violence and war that marks its

rhythm. Being stretched between the acts of historical violence is a distressing

experience for victims of patriarchal society such as Isa, who thinks of the enduring

suffering of humans, and wishes for it to end: ‘[d]own it poured like all the people in

the world weeping. . . “Oh that our human pain could here have ending!” Isa

murmured’.92

92 Woolf, Acts, 129.

3.3 Historicality and the Politics of Time

In chapter 3.2, I compared the historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant to Martin

Heidegger’s historicality: in contrast to Henri Bergson’s durée, both are forms of

temporality which are historical, communal and marked by repetition. In this chapter,

I would like to exploit this parallel to address the question of the politics of time in

Between the Acts (1941). It will be recalled from the introduction of this thesis that

Heidegger’s historicality holds a notorious politics of time, and has been seen as the

philosophical basis of Heidegger’s support of National Socialism in the early 1930s.

In particular, according to Peter Osborne, it is through Heidegger’s novel concept of

repetition that the ‘politics of Heidegger’s temporalization of history is to be found’.1

Here, by using the well-established debates concerning the politics of time in

modernity to illuminate the politics of time in literary modernism, I will ask: what are

the politics of the historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant, given its similarity to

Heidegger’s historicality? For instance, Heidegger’s portrayal in Being and Time

(1927) of the coming together of the ‘community’ or ‘people’ in a moment of

authentic co-historizing has been seen as providing a philosophical model for the

coming together of the Völk in the National Socialist Revolution. Is there a similarly

alarming politics to the historical time that brings the pageant’s audience together as a

community in Woolf’s novel?

To address such questions, I will turn to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of history in

Truth and Method (1960). Therein, Gadamer develops Heidegger’s conception of

historicality into an account of the temporalization of history as tradition. Focusing on

1 Osborne, Politics of Time, 169.

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the role of literary tradition in Gadamer’s and Woolf’s writings, I will argue that

although both Gadamer and Woolf thought of history in terms of tradition, Woolf was

more sensitive to the politically problematic aspects of tradition. We will see that,

while Gadamer advocated a rehabilitation of authority along with tradition, Woolf

envisaged anti-authoritarian forms of tradition in both her critical and fictional

writing.

The following interpretation of the politics of time in Between the Acts seeks to

contest and revise those offered by Bahun and Spiropoulou. Both of these critics have

aligned Woolf’s conceptions of history and historical time with those of Walter

Benjamin. Bahun has sought to establish ‘the coordinates of Benjamin and Woolf’s

unrealized dialogue’ on history, which she does by drawing a ‘close comparison’

between Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ and Woolf’s Between the

Acts.2 She explicitly aligns their conceptions of historical time, holding that ‘Woolf

follows Benjamin closely’ in his critique of ‘universal history unfolding in

homogenous time’, and arguing that ‘it is primarily in the relation of the three aspects

of time as shot through by the socio-political moment of “the now of recognizability”

that Benjamin’s and Woolf’s philosophies of history are commensurate’.3

In her book-length study, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with

Walter Benjamin (2010), Spiropoulou has sought to bring ‘Woolf’s historiographical

constructions’ to ‘constellation’ with aspects of Benjamin’s ‘incisive theory of

modernity and innovative philosophy of history’.4 She argues that ‘Woolf’s critique

of traditional historiographical trends in her fiction and essays is effectuated through 2 Bahun, ‘Burden’, 100. 3 Bahun, ‘Burden’, 104. 4 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 3.

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her revision of conventional notions of historical temporality . . . in ways which are

often strikingly akin to Benjamin’s radical historiographical conceptions’. She claims

that, ‘like Benjamin, she places emphasis on fragmentation and disruption rather than

historical continuities’.5 In her chapter on Between the Acts, she argues that Woolf,

like Benjamin, effects a ‘destruction of tradition’. She holds that the ‘constellatory

representations’ in this novel ‘aim at the destruction of cultural tradition’, and that the

‘historical play within the novel vitually destroys the authority of national cultural

tradition by deriding the nation’s putatively legitimate and glorious history’.6

As I mentioned above, Bahun and Spiropoulou’s comparisons between Woolf and

Benjamin make a welcome advance beyond Bergsonian readings of time in Woolf,

and draw attention to the historical and political aspects of time in her writing. In

particular, placing Woolf in this theoretical context has reinvigorated the question of

the politics of tradition in her writing. Both critics have drawn valuable parallels

between Woolf’s and Benjamin’s attitudes towards tradition. They point out that both

adopted critical attitudes towards cultural tradition and its transmission across history,

an attitude which for Benjamin is crystallised in his famous apothegms that ‘[t]here is

no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’,

and that ‘cultural treasures’ are spoils which are carried along in ‘the triumphal

procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate’.7 They

5 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 6. 6 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 148. 7 Bahun, ‘Burden’, 103, 105; Spiropoulou, Constellations, 15, 32; Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 248. Benjamin’s famous apothegms in turn echo the opening of Karl Marx’s ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852), in which men are portrayed as having to make their own history ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past’: ‘[t]he tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nighmare on the brain of the living’ (‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 329-55, 329).

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also usefully point out that both Woolf and Benjamin advocated a recuperative

attitude towards the suppressed tradition of the ‘oppressed’.8

However, while I welcome the situation of Woolf within this theoretical context, I

suggest that Woolf temporalized history as tradition rather than as the destruction of

tradition, and that her conception of history thereby resembles those of Heidegger and

Gadamer more closely than it does that of Benjamin. My departure from Bahun and

Spiropoulou is encapsulated in our contrasting approaches to the historical time of

Between the Acts. Whereas I have aligned the time of the pageant marked by the

ticking of a gramophone with Heidegger’s historicality, and thereby to his account of

the temporalization of history as tradition, Spiropoulou sees the gramophone as

merely incidental. She suggests that the ‘ticking of the gramophone’ marks a

‘mechanical clock-time’, and functions as a distraction to the audience, thereby

operating ‘as an alienation-effect’.9 By contrast, she argues that an explosive

historical time, similar to Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, operates in the pageant. She suggests

that the historical scenes of the pageant operate like Benjamin’s ‘dialectical images’,

and produce ‘constellations’ between selected parts of the past and the present

moment, in a manner that promises to blow open the continuum of history.10 The

scenes of the pageant thereby ‘aim at the destruction of cultural tradition, which they

expose as having thrived on barbarism and oppression in the name of civilization’.11

8 Bahun, ‘Burden’, 106-7; Spiropoulou, Constellations, 6, 32. 9 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 155. On Miss La Trobe’s pageant and Brecht’s alienation effects, see above. 10 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 146-8. 11 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 148. Bahun offers a similar reading of the historical time of the pageant, comparing the ‘dramatic stasis’ of the ‘Present Day’ scene to Benjamin’s notion of the ‘standstill’ (Stillstellung), a static instant in which the past and present converge and disclose the real dialectical nature of history (‘Burden’, 107-8).

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However, Spiropoulou’s interpretation of the scenes of the pageant as dialectical

images is unconvincing, and, while there are undoubtedly subversive and satirical

aspects of the pageant, it is excessive to claim that it aims ‘at the destruction of

cultural tradition’. To picture Woolf as threatening, in a politically-radical manner, to

blow open the continuum of history with an explosive historical time may be

tempting, but it is inaccurate. My counter-interpretation of the pageant as involving

the temporalization of history as tradition will throw into relief the profound

differences and disanalogies between Woolf’s and Benjamin’s conceptions of history.

It will argue for a possibility that Spiropoulou herself entertains: that the

‘constellation’ between Woolf and Benjamin could, on closer analysis, ‘open up to

their final incommensurability’.12

The Temporalization of History as Tradition

Hans-Georg Gadamer, heavily influenced by Heidegger’s conception of historicality,

developed an account of the temporalization of history as tradition in his Truth and

Method (1960).13 History, for Gadamer, appears as active tradition: ‘[e]ven the most

genuine and pure tradition does not persist because of the inertia of what once existed.

It needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated. It is, essentially, preservation, and is

active in all historical change’.14 As Osborne points out, Gadamer took his model of

tradition as an active reception and repetition of the past from Being and Time.15 In

particular, his conception of tradition develops Heidegger’s notions of ‘handing-

12 Spiropoulou, Constellations, 3. 13 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn, trans. W. Glen-Doepel, Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004). For an exposition of Gadamer’s conception of history as tradition, see Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, iii, 219-29. See also Osborne, Politics of Time, 131-2. 14 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 282. 15 Osborne, Politics of Time, 131.

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down’ and ‘inheritance’, which are two constitutive features of the structure of

historical repetition.16 Alongside the category of tradition, Gadamer undertook the

restitution and reinterpretation of the category of authority.17 Insofar as history as

tradition must be secured anew in each generation, the process of handing down is

fraught with the threat of failure in the present. Therefore, as Osborne puts it, the

‘continuity of tradition requires a constant exercise of authority to combat the threat

of betrayal inherent in its temporal structure’.18

Gadamer granted a privileged place to literary tradition within his discussion of

tradition.19 Echoing Heidegger’s notion of handing-down, Gadamer held that

literature, and linguistic tradition more generally, ‘is tradition in the proper sense of

the word—i.e. something handed down’.20 Literature thereby becomes a heritage: it is

something ‘that has come down to us by being written down’.21 Authority plays an

important role in the perpetuation of literary tradition (as it does with all forms of

tradition): in this case, it operates through ‘the authority of the educator’—the

‘teacher’, ‘superior’ or ‘expert’—who teaches literature to his or her charges.22

Overall, the transmission of literary tradition is emblematic for Gadamer of the way in

which historical continuity is established: literature is a ‘[form] of continuance’ which

has been created by ‘a will to permanence’.23

16 Thus, for Heidegger, ‘[r]epeating is handing down explicitly—that is to say, going back into the possibilities’ that are ‘inherited and yet . . . chosen’ (Being and Time, 437, 435, emphasis altered). 17 See Truth and Method, section 4.1.B.i, ‘The Rehabilitation of Authority and Tradition’ (278-85). The restitution of authority and tradition form part of Gadamer’s controversial attempt ‘to fundamentally rehabilitate the concept of prejudice’ (278). 18 Osborne, Politics of Time, 127. 19 Literary tradition forms part of the verbal tradition, the understanding of which ‘retains special priority over all other tradition’ (Truth and Method, 391). 20 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 391. Compare: ‘[l]iterature is defined by the will to hand on’ (396). 21 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 393. 22 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 281-2. 23 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 393.

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Woolf, like both Heidegger and Gadamer, thought about history in terms of tradition.

As we saw above, the temporalization of history as tradition constitutes one of the

possible forms of history within modernity. Its inherently conservative nature

contrasts with more revolutionary or ruptural forms of history, such as Walter

Benjamin’s temporalization of history as the destruction of tradition. As we shall see,

tradition and literary tradition play an important role in her late critical writings. She

offered a critique of ‘memory and tradition’ as part of her attack on patriarchal society

and culture in Three Guineas (1938). Her essay, ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940),

envisages the continuation of a literary tradition beyond the cataclysm of the Second

World War, and its possible role in the formation of a utopian, classless society. And

her last, unfinished essays, ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’ (1941), are attempts to chart an

English literary and cultural tradition from the dawn of the nation’s history until the

present day, and as such, offer a reassuring sense of historical stability and continuity.

My interpretation of Woolf’s conception of history as one of tradition partially

resembles the older critical readings of Werner Deiman and Sabine Hotho-Jackson.

Deiman argues that Woolf’s historical vision is ‘rooted in tradition’, that she was

engaged in a life-long ‘quest for a belief in history as pattern and continuity’, and that

in Between the Acts the pageant ‘becomes the major vehicle’ for the novel’s ‘vision of

[historical] continuity’.24 Hotho-Jackson similarly interprets Woolf’s view of history

to be one of tradition, continuity and stability.25 However, I by no means suggest a

return to this older critical paradigm. These older critical readings address Woolf’s

conception of history in apolitical, existential terms. Deiman suggests that Woolf’s

24 Werner J. Deiman, ‘History, Pattern and Continuity in Virginia Woolf’, Contemporary Literature, 15/1 (1974), 49-66, 61, 50, 58. 25 Sabine Hotho-Jackson, ‘Virginia Woolf on History: Between Tradition and Modernity’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 27/4 (1991), 293-313, 305-11.

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engagement with history in Between the Acts and late writings was a confrontation

with ‘the existential questions of human life’, and Hotho-Jackson similarly suggests

that ‘Woolf turned to history as an existential category’.26 By contrast, I aim to

elucidate the political aspects of Woolf’s view of history as continuity. While Woolf

was, like Gadamer, committed to an idea of the continuity of tradition, she also

adopted a circumspect attitude towards tradition, and levelled a feminist and class-

based critique of the various abuses of tradition. Indeed, her late writing provides a

critical dimension that is lacking from Gadamer’s account of history as tradition.

As part of his rehabilitation of tradition and authority, Gadamer celebrated education,

and the ‘authority of the educator’, which helps to ensure the handing down of

tradition.27 Challenging the Enlightenment conception of authority, in which authority

is opposed to reason, he argued that the true basis of authority is an act of ‘reason that

grants the authority of a superior fundamentally because he has a wider view of things

or is better informed’. The ‘authority claimed by the teacher, the superior, the expert’

is justified by the fact that ‘what the authority says is not irrational and arbitrary but

can, in principle, be discovered to be true’. Thus, he waged a defence and justification

of what might otherwise appear to be ‘the anonymous and impersonal authority of a

superior which derives from his office’.28

26 Deiman, ‘Continuity’, 50; Hotho-Jackson, ‘History’, 305. Another unsatisfactory aspect of Hotho-Jackson’s treatment of Woolf on history is her opposition of tradition to modernity. She argues that Woolf’s views of history fall between tradition and modernity, assuming the two to be mutually exclusive, in a manner which reflects the popular but erroneous view that modernity necessarily involves a complete rupture with the past and with tradition. On the contrary, as we have seen, modernity involves within its most abstract temporal form a range of competing temporalizations of history, including the temporalization of history as tradition. 27 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 281-2. 28 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 281.

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Jürgen Habermas objected to Gadamer’s conservative defence of the education

process as part of his broader criticism of Gadamer’s account of history as tradition.29

Authority in education, he suggests, threatens to perpetuate tradition and prejudice in

an insufficiently critical manner.30 More generally, he argued that Gadamer’s focus on

tradition, and his rehabilitation of the concept of authority, blinded him to the

ideological operations of power or ‘force’.31 He accused Gadamer of failing to

recognize the need of a critique of tradition, and indeed, of adopting a dogmatic

stance that precluded the possibility of such a critique. As a countermeasure,

Habermas championed ‘the power of reflection’, which confers the ability to criticize

and ‘to reject the claim of traditions’.32

In Three Guineas (1938), Woolf advanced a critique of educational institutions which

in many ways fulfils Habermas’s desire for a critique of tradition and authority. While

Gadamer celebrated educational institutions as places where tradition is handed down,

Woolf makes painfully clear that educational institutions have tended ruthlessly to

exclude women, and to perpetuate traditions which benefit men. As her narrator

points out, whereas men have been educated at public schools and universities ‘for

five or six hundred years’, the daughters of educated men have been so for only sixty.

From this follows the ‘indisputable fact’ that

'we'—meaning by 'we' a whole made up of body, brain and spirit, influenced by memory and tradition—must still differ in some essential respects from 'you', whose body, brain and spirit have been so differently trained and are so

29 Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Hermeneutic Approach’ (1967), in On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 143-70, 169. For an overview of what has become known as ‘the Habermas-Gadamer debate’, see Alan How, The Habermas-Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social: Back to Bedrock (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995). 30 Habermas, ‘Approach’, 169-70. 31 Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality’ (1970), trans. Josef Bleicher, in Josef Bleicher (ed.), Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 181-212, 204-7. 32 Habermas, ‘Hermeneutic Approach’, 168-70.

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differently influenced by memory and tradition. Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.33

While Gadamer uncritically celebrated tradition and memory (as ‘the bearer of

tradition’), Woolf in Three Guineas levelled a scathing critique of the ‘memory and

tradition’ which upholds the patriarchal order while at the same time so ruthlessly

excluding classes such as that of the daughters of educated men.34 She further made

clear that women have been excluded from positions of authority in the professions

and in religious institutions. For example, her narrator points out that ‘[i]t is true that

for the past twenty years we have been admitted to the Civil Service and to the Bar;

but our position there is still very precarious and our authority of the slightest’.35

In his rehabilitation of authority, Gadamer attempted to dissociate the concept from

that involved in authoritarian political regimes. He admitted that ‘it is primarily

persons that have authority’, and that ‘authority implies the capacity to command and

be obeyed’. Nevertheless, he hoped that his rehabilitated concept of authority is not

that of ‘modern dictatorships’ and the ‘blind obedience to commands’.36

Complementing Habermas’s suspicions concerning Gadamer’s ‘conviction that true

authority need not be authoritarian’, Woolf’s Three Guineas is an implicit challenge

to Gadamer’s defence of authority, and his counselled deference towards authority

figures on the grounds that such deference accords with ‘reason’.37

33 Woolf, Guineas, 175. 34 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 392. 35 Woolf, Guineas, 167. 36 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 281. 37 Habermas, ‘Approach’, 169; see also ‘Universality’, 207. For Gadamer’s response to this charge, see his ‘Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Critique of Ideology: Metacritical Comments on Truth and Method’ (1967), trans. Jerry Dibble, in Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (ed.), The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 274-92, 283-6. The suspicion that Gadamer’s rehabilitation of authority legitimizes an authoritarian politics might be reinforced by considering Gadamer’s debt to Heidegger’s historicality, and the controversial politics of this form of historical time.

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Three Guineas employs diverse strategies to suggest that the authority within the

educational, professional and religious institutions of patriarchal society is the same

as that of authoritarian political regimes. Woolf criticized the sartorial markers,

ceremonies and traditions by which authority and rank within hierarchical

organizations are demarcated and reinforced. Such ceremonies and traditions are

portrayed as dangerously like those embraced by the military, and as operating in a

manner similar to the fascist hypnotism of the mind through ‘the power of medals,

symbols, [and] orders’.38 For example, the essay was originally published with five

photographs: those of a procession of university dons, a group of heralds, a judge, a

bishop and a general, all of whom are depicted in their official robes of office. As

Elena Gualtieri points out, these photographs help to establish a central claim of the

essay: the ‘existence of a causal link between Fascism abroad and patriarchy at

home’.39 The regalia of the university dons is strikingly similar to that of the general,

and that of the ‘Fascist Dictator’, who is described as having a body ‘tightly encased

in a uniform’, upon the breast of which are ‘sewn several medals and other mystic

symbols’.40 Whereas Gadamer had blithely tried to dissociate the blind obedience

involved in following a dictator and that involved in following a teacher, Woolf

instead persuasively suggests their complicity.

Further, Three Guineas suggests that authority in educational establishments and

other hierarchical organizations tends to lead to war. Her narrator suggests that

38 Woolf, Guineas, 321-2. It is imperative, for Woolf’s narrator, that if women are to join the professions or universities, they must do so without creating parallel traditions themselves: ‘they will dispense with the dictated, regimented, official pageantry, in which only one sex takes an active part’ (321). 39 Elena Gualtieri, ‘Three Guineas and the Photograph: The Art of Propaganda’, in Maroula Joannou (ed.), Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 165-78, 177. 40 Woolf, Guineas, 364.

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for educated men to emphasize their superiority over other people, either in birth or intellect, by dressing differently, or by adding titles before, or letters after their names are acts that rouse competition and jealousy—emotions which . . . have their share in encouraging a disposition towards war.41

By contrast, and in response to the question of what we can do to prevent war, her

narrator suggests that ‘we can refuse all such distinctions and all such uniforms for

ourselves’.42A key part of Woolf’s strategy in Three Guineas is to show that the

authoritarian and hierarchical structures of education, religion and the professions are

the same as those of authoritarian forms of government, particularly of fascist

dictatorships, and that they lead to war.

Gadamer, as we have seen, grants priority to literary tradition, which for him plays an

important role in establishing historical continuity. He writes that ‘what is fixed in

writing has raised itself into a public sphere of meaning in which everyone who can

read has an equal share’.43 However, Woolf’s late writing implicitly discredits such a

statement. To say that the literary tradition is open to all, and that in it ‘everyone who

can read has an equal share’, is to be blind to class divisions and inequalities. In Three

Guineas, Woolf’s narrator conceded that, though women have historically been

largely excluded from the public sphere, including from educational institutions such

as public schools and universities, and though the daughters of educated men have

been secluded away in private houses, literature has nevertheless always been ‘open

to the daughters of educated men’. The ‘profession of literature’, she admitted, ‘has

never been shut to the daughters of educated men’: it ‘was impossible for any body of

41 Woolf, Guineas, 181-2. 42 Woolf, Guineas, 182. 43 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 293.

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men to corner the necessary knowledge or to refuse admittance, except on their own

terms, to those who wished to read books or to write them’.44

However, literature is not equally open to all social classes, as Woolf made clear in

‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940). She points out in this essay, which was originally

delivered as a talk to the Workers’ Educational Association in Brighton on 27 April

1940, that it has been the privileged, wealthy classes who have had access to ‘good, at

least expensive educations’: they ‘came of families rich enough to send them to public

schools and universities’.45 Such educations made writers ‘aristocrats’: ‘the

unconscious inheritors of a great tradition’. The work of such writers displays clear

evidence of such an aristocratic literary inheritance:

[p]ut a page of their writing under the magnifying glass and you will see, far away in the distance, the Greeks, the Romans; coming nearer the Elizabethans; coming nearer still Dryden, Swift, Voltaire, Jane Austen, Dickens, Henry James. Each, however much he differs individually from the others, is a man of education.46

Woolf had earlier imagined the literary tradition in a similar manner in her 1919

essay, ‘Reading’. Reading her book in the richly-furnished library of an English

country house, which contains the entire canon of English literature, the mind of this

essay’s narrator is ‘turned to the past’:

[a]lways behind the voice, the figure, the fountain there seemed to stretch an immeasurable avenue, that ran to a point of other voices, figures, fountains which tapered out indistinguishably upon the furthest horizon. If I looked down at my book I could see Keats and Pope behind him, and then Dryden and Sir Thomas Browne—hosts of them merging in the mass of Shakespeare, behind whom, if one peered long enough, some shapes of men in pilgrims’ dress emerged. Chaucer perhaps, and again—who was it? some uncouth poet scarcely able to syllable his words.47

44 Woolf, Guineas, 284. 45 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vi, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 2011), 259-83, 265. 46 Woolf, ‘Leaning Tower’, 266-7. 47 Virginia Woolf, ‘Reading’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, iii, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), 141-61, 142.

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In both cases, the literary tradition which stands behind the work being read is

imagined spatially, extending into the distance, with more ancient literary ancestors

standing further away.48 However, while Woolf’s earlier essay is, as Julia Briggs

points out, ‘class-blind’, this is far from the case with ‘The Leaning Tower’.49 Writers

become aristocratic ‘inheritors of a great tradition’ by virtue of their class position and

wealth, which has provided them with expensive educations. The class of

‘commoners and outsiders’, amongst whom Woolf implicitly includes herself, has

been denied such an education, and so looks at the ‘great tradition’ from the outside.50

Anti-Authoritarian Forms of Tradition

Whereas Gadamer advocated a restitution of authority along with tradition, Woolf

recommended an anti-authoritarian form of tradition in ‘The Leaning Tower’.

Therein, despite showing that tradition has hitherto been the preserve of the

privileged, she did not abandon tradition altogether, but rather imagined the continuity

of a literary tradition that has the power to survive the historical rupture of the Second

World War. In the final line of the essay, she called for ‘commoners and outsiders like

ourselves’ ‘to preserve’ and ‘to create’, an exhortation which suggests a temporal

48 Woolf’s spatial imagination of the literary tradition stretching into the distance is similar to Gadamer’s description of ‘temporal distance’ (which he understood by way of Heidegger’s interpretation of ‘Dasein’s mode of being in terms of time’) not as ‘a yawning abyss’, but as ‘filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us’ (Truth and Method, 296-7). 49 Julia Briggs, ‘“Almost Ashamed of England Being so English”: Virginia Woolf and Ideas of Englishness’, in Reading Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 190-207, 194. Briggs points out that the library described in ‘Reading’ ‘would have looked very different from “below stairs”’: servants ‘only enter the library to dust the books, not to enjoy their contents’ (194). 50 Woolf, ‘Leaning Tower’, 278.

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stance of both looking back to the past and forwards towards the future.51 ‘It is thus’,

she wrote, ‘that English literature will survive this war’.52

Woolf proposed that the literary tradition should be continued in an anti-authoritarian

manner. Whereas previously it had been the educated male elite who had had access

to the tradition, she called for commoners and outsiders to read and to write, and

suggested making a start by borrowing from public lending libraries: ‘Aeschylus,

Shakespeare, Virgil, and Dante, who, if they could speak . . . would say, “Don’t leave

me to the wigged and gowned. Read me, read me for yourselves”.’53 She

recommended a transgressive form of reading, which she illustrated with an analogy

of trespassing on private property, paraphrasing Leslie Stephen: ‘Whenever you see a

board up with “Trespassers will be prosecuted,” trespass at once’.54 Whereas literature

had once been the province of the elite, fenced-off as private property, she

recommended that it be taken possession of by commoners and outsiders. It does not

matter ‘if we get our accents wrong, or have to read with a crib in front of us’: ‘we

shall trample many flowers and bruise much ancient grass’.55 Literature, it is hoped,

will then stand as the ‘common ground’.56

Woolf’s defiant resolution to ‘bruise much ancient grass’ echoes A Room of One’s

Own (1929), in which the prohibition to walk on the lawns of Oxbridge colleges was

51 Woolf, ‘Leaning Tower’, 278. Compare Gadamer’s description of tradition as ‘essentially preservation’ (Truth and Method, 282). 52 Woolf, ‘Leaning Tower’, 278. 53 Woolf, ‘Leaning Tower’, 277. 54 Woolf, ‘Leaning Tower’, 277; Leslie Stephen, Studies of a Biographer, iii (London: Duckworth, 1902), 276-7. 55 Woolf, ‘Leaning Tower’, 277. 56 Woolf, ‘Leaning Tower’, 278. Compare A Room of One’s Own: ‘[l]iterature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass’ (98).

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associated with the exclusion of women from university education.57 The conceit of

literary trespassing conveys a deliberate flaunting of authority, and thereby forms a

strong contrast with Gadamer’s counselled respect for authority. It encapsulates a

critical attitude towards tradition, much like that called for by Habermas.58 While

tradition and memory can, as Three Guineas makes clear, exclude women and sustain

a patriarchal order, they also have the potential to combat class and gender divisions

and inequalities. If they operate in an anti-authoritarian manner, they could pave the

way to what is envisaged in ‘The Leaning Tower’ as a utopian society, a future ‘world

without classes’.59

Woolf imagined another anti-authoritarian form of literary tradition in her unfinished

late essays, ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’ (1941). These essays were originally planned as

chapters in ‘a Common History book’, which was to be an attempt to ‘read from one

end of [literature] including [biography]; & range at will, consecutively’.60 Written

during the early stages of the war, they can be seen as an attempt to look back, in a

time of crisis, to the reassuring sense of historical stability and continuity offered by

an English literary and cultural tradition.61 As such, they provide a sense of tradition

much like that of Gadamer, for whom tradition establishes continuity in history.

However, ‘Anon’ envisages a form of literary tradition which is, unlike that of

Gadamer, anti-authoritarian.

57 Woolf, Room, 6-7. 58 Benjamin draws attention to the danger that tradition could serve as ‘a tool of the ruling classes’, and famously holds that ‘[i]n every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’ (‘Theses’, 247). However, I suggest that Woolf falls short of Benjamin’s wholescale ‘destruction of tradition’, and that her attitute towards tradition more closely resembles a critically-inflected version of that of Gadamer. 59 Woolf, ‘Leaning Tower’, 274. 60 See Woolf’s diary entry for 12 September 1940; Diary, v, 318. 61 One of Woolf’s notes in an early plan for the book encapsulates what was to become a major theme of the essays: ‘[t]he continuity of tradition’ (‘Anon’, 373). She adds: ‘[t]he song making instinct. . . . This is continuity— . . . certain emotions always in being: felt by people always’ (374).

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The relevant sense of authority in ‘Anon’ is not that of Gadamer’s educator, who

hands down the literary tradition, but rather that of the artist, whose works become

part of the literary tradition. In particular, Woolf contrasts an idealized early tradition

of literature and song, created by a motley crew of anonymous singers and

playwrights, with the later creation of artworks by named individual artists, or

authors. The earlier tradition was, according to Woolf, brought to an end with the

invention of the printing press and the emergence of the modern ‘author’: the ‘first

blow has been aimed at Anon when the authors [sic] name is attached to the book.

The individual emerges’.62 While the earlier anonymous literary tradition had been a

common property, from which artists were able freely to ‘borrow’ and ‘repeat’, the

author’s name being attached to the book implied a new form of authority within the

literary tradition, as individual works became the property of specific individuals.63

Woolf suggests that although the early anonymous tradition has largely died out, it

continues to exist in various modified forms. For example, she claims that the

‘anonymous world’ still exists ‘beneath our consciousness’, and is a ‘world to which

we can still return’.64 The hint of a possible renewal of the authorless tradition

complements the hope raised in ‘The Leaning Tower’ of the continuation of a literary

tradition by a wider class of writers, including those who have previously been

excluded from the sphere of high culture. As we shall see, Woolf explored the

possibility of a similar continuation of literary tradition in Between the Acts.

62 Woolf, ‘Anon’, 385. 63 Woolf, ‘Anon’, 397. 64 Woolf, ‘Anon’, 385.

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Tradition and Politics at Pointz Hall

Between the Acts is a novel saturated in tradition. The comparison drawn above

between the historical time of Miss La Trobe’s pageant and Heidegger’s historicality

suggests that Woolf, like both Heidegger and Gadamer, temporalized history in terms

of tradition. Indeed, history appears as tradition at Pointz Hall: as the transmission of

received heritages, which are threatened in the present by the prospect of historical

rupture by war.

The novel is set in a quintessential English village, immersed in tradition. The Olivers

are a comparatively new family to the area, having been there ‘[o]nly something over

a hundred and twenty years’, but many of the families are far more ancient, having

‘been there for centuries, never selling an acre’.65 The fishmonger’s boy, on his

delivery round, visits places ‘whose names, like his own, were in Domesday Book’.66

The annual pageant in the novel forms a tradition, having been performed the past

seven years, as does Bart and Lucy’s ritualistic rehearsal of a conversation about

whether it will rain or be fine, and whether, consequently, it would be better to hold

the pageant in the barn or outside. Isa has become so habituated to this conversation

that she can predict each of its turns in advance.67 Indeed, much of the characters’

habitual behaviour has sedimented into forms of tradition. Lucy, for instance, ponders

each year the ‘recurring question’ of whether she should take a house in Kensington

or in Kew, before predictably deciding to stay in Hastings.68 Much of the action of the

frame-narrative falls within the familiar channels of habit: conversation at lunch turns

65 Woolf, Acts, 5, 54. 66 Woolf, Acts, 23. 67 Woolf, Acts, 16. 68 Woolf, Acts, 18.

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to the well-worn topic of the portraits that hang in the dining room; sitting on the lawn

after lunch, the customary remarks about the view are made; and Lucy’s tour of the

house for William Dodge follows a well-rehearsed pattern.69

The novel is also permeated with a sense of literary tradition, albeit a tradition whose

coherence and stability is constantly put into question.70 While the novel is itself a

densely woven tissue of allusions and echoes from a literary tradition, within the

novel, Miss La Trobe’s pageant presents what is in part a history of English literature,

and includes meta-theatrically an Elizabethan drama and a Restoration comedy. Miss

La Trobe is described as having ‘the whole of English literature to choose from’ as

inspiration for writing her pageant.71 Isa browses in the library at Pointz Hall, the

‘heart of the house’, which is described in an earlier draft of the novel as containing

the ‘whole of literature’.72 However, she passes over literature, biography and history

to pick up instead a newspaper, which ‘[f]or her generation . . . was a book’.73

69 Woolf, Acts, 35-6, 38-9, 50-4. 70 Indeed, on Alex Zwerdling’s pessimistic interpretation of the novel, Miss La Trobe’s pageant ‘is intended to show us a society and a cultural tradition breaking down into its component parts’ (Real World, 321). The precariousness of the literary tradition conveyed in Between the Acts parallels Woolf’s feeling, which she recorded in her wartime diary, of the instability of ‘the “tradition”’: ‘the war—our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation—has taken away the outer wall of security. . . . even the “tradition” has become transparent’ (see Woolf’s diary entries for 27 June and 24 July 1940; Diary, v, 299, 304). For Woolf, this turning transparent of the tradition is related to her sense that there is no readership to receive her works: ‘[n]o echo comes back. I have no surroundings. I have so little sense of a public that I forget about [Roger Fry: A Biography] coming or not coming out. Those familiar circumvolutions—those standards—which have for so many years given back an echo & so thickened my identity are all wide & wild as the desert now’ (299). In Gadamer’s terms, with the dissipation of the reading public due to the war, there is no-one to receive new literature, and the process of handing-down, which is so essential to the establishment of historical continuity, is broken. Certainly, Woolf’s awareness of the loss of her readers is linked to her sense that history will come to an end, and that there will be no future: ‘[w]e pour to the edge of a precipice . . . & then? I cant conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941’ (299). 71 Woolf, Acts, 43. 72 Woolf, ‘Earlier Typescript’, 48. More fully, the library is described as containing the whole of literature ‘from Chaucer’: ‘[w]hat Chaucer had begun was continued with certain lapses from his day to this very morning. . . . Chaucer, the great originator of this still-continuing conversation or argument or song, faced the window’ (48-9). 73 Woolf, Acts, 15.

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Characters quote and misquote from the history of English literature. Bart chafes Mrs

Manresa that she ‘has her Shakespeare by heart’, to which she responds by quoting

the opening of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, flirtatiously asking Giles to

help her finish the speech; Isa comes to Giles’s rescue, misquoting a line from John

Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.74 Literary fragments surface in characters’

consciousnesses throughout the day, in part prompted by the pageant: Giles quotes a

line from King Lear, and Bart murmurs a line from Algernon Swinburne’s ‘Itylus’.75

In an earlier draft of the novel, Lucy Swithin remarks on the sense in which literary

tradition forges a sense of continuity:

‘Gather ye roses while ye may,’ Dodge translated it for her. ‘That’s an old saying!’ Mrs. Swithin exclaimed. ‘How I like ‘em! They give one such a sense of continuity. Everybody coming to the same conclusion.’76

Ironically, the ‘saying’ is a commonplace about transience. The line appears in a

poem by Robert Louis Stevenson which in turn echoes one by Robert Herrick:

‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/ Old Time is still a-flying’.77 Yet Lucy Swithin’s

enthusiasm is not completely undercut by this irony: even sayings about the

transience of the individual life can provide a sense of continuity on the historical

level. Such sayings form part of a literary and cultural tradition which is capable of

being gathered together into a meaningful whole in an act of Augustinean attentio or

Heideggarian repetition.

74 Woolf, Acts, 40. 75 Woolf, Acts, 62, 80. 76 Woolf, ‘Earlier Typescript’, 158. 77 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Gather Ye Roses’, in Poems, Hitherto Unpublished (Chicago: Bibliophile Society, 1921), 86; Robert Herrick, ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’, in Arthur Quiller-Couch (ed.), The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 218. Mitchell Leaska points out that one source of the saying is Herrick’s poem, whose first line Woolf paraphrased in her diary on 31 August 1938 (Pointz Hall, 238; Diary, v, 165). The saying is also similar to that in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596)—‘Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime’—which, as we saw above, Woolf copied in her reading notes.

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The sense of tradition afforded by the pageant in Between the Acts plays on T. S.

Eliot’s influential understanding of tradition. Eliot advanced his conception of

tradition in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), and returned to it in After

Strange Gods (1934).78 Whereas Heidegger and Gadamer provide accounts of the

temporalization of history as tradition from within the philosophical discourse of

modernity, Eliot provides a comparable account of tradition and the historical sense

from within literary modernism. William Dodge, in an early draft of the novel, thinks

of Miss La Trobe’s pageant acting as ‘“a disintegration of personality”’.79 His phrase

echoes Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry, and the apothegm in ‘Tradition and the

Individual Talent’ that the ‘progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a

continual extinction of personality’.80 Woolf had recorded this maxim in the notes that

she took on Eliot’s essay.81 It is not clear, in Dodge’s use of the term, whether he has

in mind the disintegration of the personality of the artist, or of the audience. In the

latter case, Eliot’s focus on the impersonality of the poet is transferred to that of a

communal audience, in a manner which complements Woolf’s intention to explore

community in the novel. For Eliot, the impersonality of the poet is related to his sense

of tradition: he suggests that achieving impersonality involves being ‘conscious, not

of what is dead, but of what is already living’.82 Given that the Pointz Hall pageant

presents a literary tradition on stage, Dodge’s remark that the pageant is an attempt to 78 Woolf took notes on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, along with other essays in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), in what in what is now known as Reading Notebook XXXVIII: see Silver, Notebooks, 192. She wrote to Eliot that, having ‘picked up The Sacred Wood’, she ‘came home and burnt every one of [her] own leading articles in the Supplement’: ‘[w]hy are you the only man who ever says anything interesting about literature?’ (Letter to T. S. Eliot, 3 September 1924; Letters, iii, 129). After Strange Gods advertises itself as a ‘re-formulation’ of the problem of tradition (After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 15). Whereas Eliot had approached the question of tradition as a ‘purely literary one’ in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in After Strange Gods he construed tradition in a broader sense, as encompassing ‘habitual actions, habits and customs’ (15, 18). 79 Woolf, ‘Earlier Typescript’, 113. 80 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 42-53, 47. 81 Virginia Woolf, ‘Reading Notebook XXXVIII’, Sussex, Monks House Papers, B.2d, 20. 82 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 53.

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disintegrate personality suggests a similar connection between impersonality and

tradition.

Dodge’s remark invites a broader comparison between Miss La Trobe’s literary-

historical pageant and Eliot’s theories of tradition and the historical sense. Tradition,

in Eliot’s seminal essay, concerns the ‘historical sense’, which

involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.83

The ‘Present Day’ scene of Miss La Trobe’s pageant dramatises a scenario which

corresponds closely to this historical sense. Just as the ‘whole of literature’ for Eliot

has a ‘simultaneous existence’ to the man with historical sense, so actors from

different periods of the literary past reappear simultaneously on stage in the Present

Day scene of the pageant, each declaiming ‘some phrase or fragment from their

parts’.84 And just as Eliot’s historical sense involves a ‘perception’ of the ‘presence’

of the past, so this scene of the pageant offers the audience a literal perception of

actors from the various past ages of the pageant, as they return and appear physically

present on stage.

However, Miss La Trobe’s scene stands in an ironic relationship to Eliot’s historical

sense. Whereas in Eliot’s historical sense, the whole of literature ‘composes a

simultaneous order’, in the Present Day scene the literary past returns in a chaotic and

disordered manner. The literary fragments declaimed by the actors form a cacophony,

83 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 44. 84 Woolf, Acts, 132.

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as lines from King Lear and Macbeth are mixed with nursery rhymes and nonsense

phrases. The scene is one of ‘uproar’ which had ‘passed quite beyond control’.85 In

contrast to the order of Eliot’s literary tradition, tradition in Between the Acts is

threatened with incoherence and disorder, and its continuity into the future is radically

uncertain.

Between the Acts reflects the ambivalent attitude towards tradition expressed in

Woolf’s late critical writings. Initially, it should be remarked that the novel intimates

the dangers of an authoritarian form of tradition, in part through the repetitive

historical time of the pageant. As we saw in chapter 3.2, the historical time of the

pageant suggests violence, as the repetitive ticking of the gramophone is associated

with the rape of a girl by guardsmen. Similarly, history in Three Guineas, figured by a

‘gramophone whose needle has stuck’, is portrayed as one of the incessant repetition

of war waged by patriarchal societies sustained by ‘memory and tradition’. Both

works convey the violence which accompanies the perpetuation of history as tradition

within patriarchal society.

The dangers of an authoritarian form of tradition are further conveyed in Between the

Acts through the character of Miss La Trobe, who, as critics have pointed out, at times

resembles a fascist dictator. For Patricia Joplin, Between the Acts is a ‘meditation on

the proximity of artist to dictator—of author to authoritarian ruler’, and Miss La

Trobe at times ‘bears a striking resemblance to a petty dictator’.86 Michele Pridmore-

Brown similarly points out that Miss La Trobe is ‘made to resemble a führer at the

beginning of the play’, and Judith Johnston remarks that she and Adolf Hitler both 85 Woolf, Acts, 132-3. 86 Patricia Klindienst Joplin, ‘The Authority of Illusion: Feminism and Fascism in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts’, South Central Review, 6/2 (Summer 1989), 88-104, 89, 88.

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came ‘to power’ in the same year: 1933.87 Miss La Trobe’s occasional likeness to a

dictator intimates the dangers of authority in the perpetuation of history as tradition,

whether it be narrowly the authority of the artist over their work (and particularly of

Miss La Trobe as the authoritarian mediator of the literary tradition), or more broadly

the authority of a political leader over his or her followers. The proximity of her roles

as artist and dictator makes the suggestive connection, which Gadamer was so keen to

resist, between authority in the perpetuation of (literary) tradition, and authority in

authoritarian politics.

While Miss La Trobe occasionally resembles a fascist dictator, her actors and

audience correlatively at times resemble a community led by such a dictator. The

actors are figured as ‘troops’ obeying orders ‘barked out in guttural accents’, and the

audience are compared by the anonymous megaphonic voice to ‘gun slayers’ and

‘bomb droppers’.88 Since, as we saw in the previous chapter, the historical time of the

pageant plays an important role in uniting the audience as a community, suspicion is

transmitted to this historical time. Such a suspicion might be reinforced by

considering hostile interpretations of the politics of Heidegger’s historicality. Just as

Heidegger’s authentic historicality has been seen as providing a model for the coming

together of a fascist community led by Hitler, so the historical time of the pageant

unites the audience into a community led by the dictatorial Miss La Trobe.

87 Michele Pridmore-Brown, ‘1939-40: Of Virginia Woolf, Gramophones, and Fascism’, PMLA, 113/3 (May 1998), 408-21, 413; Johnston, ‘Remediable Flaw’, 264. 88 Woolf, Acts, 46, 134. Miss La Trobe barks out orders to her troops in ‘guttural accents’ as if she were a German military leader, or even Hitler, whose speeches Woolf listened to on the radio. For instance, on 5 September 1938, Woolf anticipated listening to Hitler’s ‘mad voice vociferating’ at the Nuremberg rally (Diary, v, 166). Again, on 9 November 1939, she recorded how ‘we listened to the ravings, the strangled hysterical sobbing swearing ranting of Hitler at the Beer Hall’ (Diary, v, 245). Miss La Trobe’s preference for child actors with ‘[f]air hair’ over those with ‘dark’ is alarming, given the context of National Socialist racial ideology (47).

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While Between the Acts intimates the dangers of an authoritarian form of tradition, it

also depicts the renewal of an anti-authoritarian form of tradition. Critics such as

Joplin, Cuddy-Keane and Pridmore-Brown have interpreted Between the Acts as a

novel which foregrounds the risks of authoritarian forms of society, yet ultimately

provides a more positive model of community. For Joplin, Miss La Trobe renounces

her role of ‘author-as-tyrant’ in ‘her finer moments’ and thereby becomes ‘the author

as anti-fascist’: at this point, the audience is transformed into ‘a community conscious

of its internal differences but momentarily united and at peace’.89 Similarly, Cuddy-

Keane points out that though Miss La Trobe is ‘almost a negative authority figure’

and at one point ‘resembles a commander at war’, other factors serve to ‘counteract

her domineering role’. For her, the choric voice which emerges from the pageant

‘subverts the habitual dominance of the leader figure and introduces a new concept of

community in which the insider-outsider dichotomy is erased’.90 Finally, Pridmore-

Brown argues that Miss La Trobe eventually ‘relinquishes her führerlike bearing’, and

the previously herd-like crowd are transformed into a community governed by a

‘pluralist politics that affirms internal difference and that consists in a perpetual

formation, expansion, and linking of subject positions’.91

What can be added to these assessments is that Miss La Trobe’s renunciation of her

dictatorial role corresponds to the renewal of an anti-authoritarian form of tradition.

The pageant portrays an anonymous tradition of song which runs throughout English

literature and history, much like that envisaged in ‘Anon’. This tradition is

represented by the chorus of the pageant, made up of a file of undifferentiated

villagers, who first emerge singing with a common voice in the early stages of 89 Joplin, ‘Authority’, 90, 97. 90 Cuddy-Keane, ‘Politics’, 278, 275. 91 Pridmore-Brown, ‘Gramophones’, 417.

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history, and return at various later stages. While the pageant thereby depicts an

anonymous tradition of art, it is further implied that the pageant itself forms part of

and renews this tradition. Notably, when the Rev Streatfield looks for someone to

thank at the end of the pageant, Miss La Trobe remains conspicuously absent: she

‘wishes’, as he puts it, ‘to remain anonymous’.92 She becomes like the ‘anonymous

playwright’ of ‘Anon’, and in particular, like one of the idealized anonymous

Elizabethan dramatists who preceded the emergence of the named playwright. Such

dramatists remain anonymous . . . the play itself was still anonymous. The lack of Marlowes [sic] name, or of Kyds [sic], shows how largely the play was a common product, written by one hand, but so moulded in transition that the author had no sense of property in it. It was in part the work of the audience.93

By renouncing her authorial role, Miss La Trobe comes to resemble Woolf’s

anonymous Elizabethan playwrights who ‘had no sense of property’ in their work.

At its best, the pageant in Between the Acts becomes an exemplary model of

communal artistic creation. It is not the product of a single authoritarian artist. Rather,

it is, like Woolf’s Elizabethan plays, a ‘common product’ and ‘in part the work of the

audience’.94 It is also the product of ‘commoners and outsiders’ such as Albert, the

‘village idiot’. By relinquishing her authorial control over the pageant, Miss La Trobe

shows that the English literary tradition which the pageant depicts is not the property

of an elite group of aristocratic inheritors, but is rather open to all, like the ‘common

ground’ of ‘The Leaning Tower’. By renewing an anonymous tradition of song and

literature, the pageant raises the salutary prospect of the continuation of such a

92 Woolf, Acts, 139. 93 Woolf, ‘Anon’, 398, 395. Brenda Silver discusses the pageant of Between the Acts alongside Elizabethan drama, and points out that the Elizabethan playhouse ‘had long been for Virginia Woolf a symbol of community’ (‘Community’, 293). 94 In Between the Acts, the audience enthusiastically join in with the play. Most notably, in the Elizabethan section of the pageant, Mrs Manresa sings the worlds of a song with such abandon that the roles of audience and actors become confused: it somehow becomes the case that Mrs Manresa ‘was the Queen; and he (Giles) was the surly hero’ (68).

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tradition into the future. This is the prospect that, as Woolf put it in ‘The Leaning

Tower’, ‘English literature will survive this war’ and cross the gulf to a ‘classless and

towerless society of the future’.95

* * *

In the third and final part of this study, we have seen that Woolf’s conception of

history in her late writing was one of continuity and tradition. In Between the Acts, the

inherently conservative fiction of an aeviternal continuity across history, and the

historical time of the pageant marked by the ticking of a gramophone, underpin a

conception of history which differs from more revolutionary forms of history, such as

those of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Correlatively, we have seen that

Woolf’s conception of history is more politically conservative than those of Brecht

and Benjamin, particularly as regards class. For example, we saw that in Between the

Acts, the pageant’s depiction of the working class as aeviternally frozen in a state of

subordination conceptually forecloses the possibility of revolutionary political action.

However, this is not to say that there are not politically radical aspects to Woolf’s

conception of history, and in particular, radically feminist aspects. For example, as we

have seen, in her last novel the fiction of the aevum intimates the danger of timelessly

naturalized gender roles, and the repetitive historical time conveys the dangers of the

perpetuation of history as tradition within a patriarchal society. Moreover, although

she falls short of a revolutionary Marxist attitude towards class, she explores in her

critical and fictional writing how ‘commoners and outsiders’ might exploit anti-

95 Woolf, ‘Leaning Tower’, 278, 276.

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authoritarian forms of tradition to redress the manifest gender and class inequalities in

society, and to direct history towards a more egalitarian future.

CONCLUSION

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‘It takes imagination and courage to picture what would happen to the West . . . if its temporal fortunes were suddenly invaded by the Time of its Other.’

Johannes Fabian1

This study opened by challenging the dominant Bergsonian critical approaches to the

issue of time in modernist literature, and the misrepresentations of the politics of

modernist time to which they have led. The following chapters then developed this

challenge by showing that H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf all

explored different versions of historical time in their fictional and historical writings:

Wells explored geological time, Lawrence adapted Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought of

eternal recurrence, and Woolf imagined an aeviternal historical continuity and a

phenomenological historical time. The focus on historical time is well-suited to

challenge Bergsonian approaches, and their tendency to portray the supposed

modernist exploration of a Bergsonian private time as asocial and ahistorical, because

it draws attention to the communal and historical aspects of modernist temporality.

Further, the focus on historical time discredits the dominant Bergsonian picture

insofar as it has played an important role in the debate about the politics of

modernism. What are no longer plausible are György Lukács’s and Randall

Stevenson’s contrasting interpretations of the politics of modernist time.2 Both

Lukács’s interpretation of modernist time as an ideologically retrograde denial of

history, and Stevenson’s counter-interpretation of it as a politically progressive act of

resistance achieved through aesthetic autonomy, are flawed, because of the shared

Bergsonian presuppositions of their arguments. Wells, Lawrence and Woolf engage

1 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 35. 2 Lukács, Realism, 37-9; Stevenson, ‘Secluded Path’, 49-51.

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with historical time in a manner that does not deny history, but on the contrary, opens

up history, and what is more, different conceptions of history. Moreover, their

experiments with historical time do not constitute a retreat from the political, but

carry differing politics, and are sites of political contestation. Geological time, in

Wells’s universal histories, becomes politicized as it becomes humanized: it supports

his advocacy of a cosmopolitan world state. The pseudo-Nietzschean cycles of history

in Lawrence’s Movements in European History (1921) are used to support a bellicose

politics of leadership, whereas the fictional imagination of eternal recurrence in Lady

Chatterley’s Lover (1928) corresponds to a peaceful vision of a green revaluation of

the earth. The historical time of the pageant in Between the Acts (1941) conveys the

dangers of tradition and authority as forms of historical transmission, whereas the

fiction of aeviternal continuity threatens to petrify exploitative gender and class

relations in a changeless nature, without prospect of emancipatory historical change.

Transferring Peter Osborne’s notion of a ‘politics of time’ to the literary sphere, I

have argued that these competing configurations of historical time in literary

modernism form the analogue of the competing versions of such a time within

modernity, emblematized by the contrasting accounts of historical time of Martin

Heidegger and Walter Benjamin.

Approaching the politics of modernism through the politics of time has brought to

light a very mixed set of politics. It should come as no surprise that some of the

politics discussed above are reactionary. As Terry Eagleton remarks, it is a ‘well-

known scandal’ that many of the most eminent modernist writers held ‘obnoxious

politics views’.3 Indeed, we have seen that some of Wells’s, Lawrence’s and Woolf’s

3 Eagleton, English Novel, 258.

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experiments with historical time issue in reactionary politics. For example, we saw

that Wells’s use of deep time in his later writing is arguably guilty of a form of

cultural and political neo-imperialism, and that Lawrence in Movements adapted

Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence to support his authoritarian leadership

politics. I should make clear that by discussing conservative or reactionary aspects of

these writers’ politics, I do not thereby subscribe to a similar politics myself. For

example, I have contested critical readings of Woolf which portray her as holding a

revolutionary materialist conception of history, similar to those of Bertolt Brecht and

Walter Benjamin. I have argued instead that she thought of history more

conservatively in terms of continuity and tradition. Such a revisionary interpretation is

not itself politically conservative, but rather is motivated by a desire to understand

better, and more accurately, the politics of Woolf’s writing.

However, addressing historical time has not only disclosed a new set of reactionary

modernist politics. It has also revealed a variety of more affirmative politics. For

example, we saw that Lawrence’s adaptation of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal

recurrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover makes a welcome move beyond his earlier

authoritarian politics, and complements certain recent celebrations of Nietzsche as a

proto-ecological thinker. Again, we saw that while there are politically conservative

aspects of Woolf’s conception of history as regards class, there are also radically

feminist elements of that conception. Her feminist critique of tradition in patriarchal

society, and her imagination of alternative anti-authoritarian forms of tradition, in

many ways fulfill Jürgen Habermas’s desire for a critically-reflexive approach to

history as tradition. For her, anti-authoritarian types of tradition become ways of

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bringing about positive social change, and of directing history towards a more

egalitarian future.

In order to rethink the issue of modernist time outside the sphere of Bergsonian

concepts—which has been the task of this thesis—I identified in my introduction the

pressing need of breaking free from Stephen Kern’s influential understanding of time

in modernism and modernity. In order to break free from this framework, I have

replaced Kern’s notion of modernity as characterized by the solidification of a

homogenous public time with Peter Osborne’s notion of modernity as characterized

by a competing range of temporalizations of history.4 This substitution has proved

sympathetic to my investigation of historical time in the work of Wells, Lawrence and

Woolf. However, such a substitution has further value beyond the bounds of this

study. Reading modernist literature alongside Osborne’s notion of modernity opens

up new critical questions which had been foreclosed by Kern’s theorization, and

provides a framework for the continuing reassessment of the politics of modernist

time. Whereas Kern’s model of modernity reduces the range of modernist

experiments with time to a uniform exploration of private time, Osborne’s model, by

recognizing a diversity of temporalities within modernity, opens the way for the

recognition of a similar diversity of temporalities in literary modernism. Moreover,

while Kern’s model encourages a blanket reading of the politics of modernist time,

Osborne’s model opens the possibility that the different forms of temporality within

literary modernism carry a divergent set of politics, and indeed are sites of political

contestation.

4 Osborne, Politics of Time, 116.

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In the remainder of this conclusion, I would like to indicate one potential future use of

the theoretical framework adopted in this thesis: as one for conducting an

investigation into the politics of modernist time in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

While this thesis has touched only briefly on such issues, with the suggestion that

Wells’s progressive scheme of history is guilty of a form of neo-imperialism, their

importance is suggested—somewhat ironically, given his role in my introduction—by

Wyndham Lewis. While Lewis was portrayed as something of a villain in the

introduction to this thesis, here I would like to return, in something of a commodius

vicus of recirculation, to Time and Western Man (1927).5 In particular, I would like to

explore one of his more intriguing suggestions concerning the political aspects of

what he identified as the contemporary fascination with time and history: that Oswald

Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918-22) is guilty of a form of temporal colonialism.

Lewis critiqued the politics of the Decline of the West, which stood for him as a

‘perfect model of what a time-book should be’.6 He objected to the contrast which

Spengler drew between the highly developed historical consciousness of modern

Western man, and the supposedly ‘ahistoric mind’ of other cultures and peoples.

Spengler argued that while modern ‘men of the West’ have a sophisticated historical

consciousness, other cultures have an ‘ahistoric spirit’, for which there ‘is certainly no

5 Two contentions that can usefully be extracted from Lewis’s polemic, and deployed as correctives to later Bergsonian approaches to the question of time in modernism, are that the fascination with time in the period extended to a fascination with history—‘the “time” view is the historical view par excellence’—and that such a fascination with history is deeply political: ‘[w]here history is concerned . . . no one is able to contend that the historian is not a politician’ (Time, 246, 247). This thesis is able fully to endorse both contentions. The former stands as a useful corrective to Lukács’s influential argument that the modernist concern with time paradoxically took part in a wider denial of history, and the latter stands as a corrective to the widespread view, espoused by both Lukács and Stevenson, that the modernist concern with time involves a retreat from political concerns. Of course, by returning to Lewis, I by no means wish to rehabilitate the Bergsonian aspects of his argument. 6 Lewis, Time, 113.

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world-history, no world-as-history’.7 For instance, Spengler claimed that in ‘the

Indian Culture we have the perfectly ahistoric soul. Its decisive expression is the

Brahman Nirvana’.8 Echoing Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1734), in which the

‘poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind/ Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind’,

Lewis suggested that by attributing to him an ‘untutored ahistoric mind’, Spengler

‘treats the poor Indian . . . with the same lofty pity and disdain that the conquering

White showed for the “poor Indian”’.9 The charge is that Spengler’s history is guilty

of a conceited and disdainful form of imperialism, ‘nourished upon a sort of time-

jingoism’.10 Indeed, Lewis rhetorically aligned Spengler’s ascription of an ‘ahistoric

mind’ to the Indian with forms of aggressive colonial conquest, comparing Spengler’s

overrunning of Indian history to ‘our ancestors [overrunning] the New World and the

Orient’.11

Johannes Fabian has levelled an influential critique of anthropology on the grounds

that it displays a form of ‘time-jingoism’ similar to that identified by Lewis. In Time

and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), he argues that

anthropology has, from its formation as an academic discipline, been characterized by

what he calls a ‘denial of coevalness’: a ‘persistent and systematic tendency to place 7 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. C. Atkinson, i (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1926), 8; quoted in Lewis, Time, 213. 8 Spengler, Decline, i, 11; quoted in Lewis, Time, 214. Spengler claimed that ‘[w]e men of Western Culture are, with our historical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is our world picture and not mankind’s. Indian and Classical man formed no image of a world in progress’ (15). On Spengler’s conception of the ‘historyless’ condition of certain cultures, see also Decline, ii, 46-51. 9 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1950), 27; Lewis, Time, 214. 10 Lewis, Time, 214. For Spengler, every culture ‘possesses a specific and peculiar sort of history’ which is made possible by that culture’s ‘time-sense’ (Decline, i, 131). Thus, for example, he claimed that the ‘Indians . . . have no sort of time-reckoning (the absence of it in their case expressing their Nirvana) and no clocks, and therefore no history’ (133). In ‘complete contrast to the almost dreamy unconsciousness of the Indian’ is the ‘intense historical awareness’ of Western man, which is underpinned by a highly sophisticated time-sense: ‘man has never . . . been so awake and aware, so deeply sensible of time and conscious of direction and fate and movements as he has been in the West’ (131, 133). 11 Lewis, Time, 214.

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the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of

anthropological discourse’.12 That is, anthropological discourse has invariably placed

anthropologists and their readers in a privileged time frame, while banishing the Other

to a stage of lesser development, and often to a position which falls entirely outside of

time and history.

For Fabian, the denial of coevalness which characterizes anthropology is one facet of

the ‘chronopolitics’ of ‘colonialist-imperial expansion’. He contends that new

conceptions of time, which resulted from the secularization and naturalization of

Judeo-Christian historical time, both facilitated the denial of coevalness in

anthropology, and more generally provided an ideological support for imperial

expansion. As he puts it, ‘Secularized Time had become a means to occupy space, a

title conferring on its holders the right to “save” the expanse of the world for

history’.13 While aggressive and expansive imperial societies historically required

space to occupy, they also more profoundly ‘required Time to accommodate the

schemes of a one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative

mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition)’.14 That is, ‘geopolitics has

its ideological foundation in chronopolitics’.15 Fabian’s diagnosis of chronopolitics as

the ideological foundation of geopolitics stands a complementary theoretical

counterpart to Lewis’s suggestive rhetorical association between the ‘historical

12 Fabian, Time, 31, emphasis removed. 13 Fabian, Time, 146. 14 Fabian, Time, 144. While I fully endorse Fabian’s contention that geopolitics has its ideological foundation in chronopolitics, I would modify his claim that modernity is characterized by a single form of time—roughly, a secularized Judeo-Christian time (2). In this respect, Fabian’s thesis resembles that of Benedict Anderson, who claims that the Judeo-Christian time of the mediaeval period was succeeded by a single time of modernity (which is also the time of nations): an homogenous empty time (Communities, 24). By contrast, and as an extension of the approach taken in this thesis, both positions should be replaced with Osborne’s superior conception of modernity being characterized by a range of competing temporalizations of history. 15 Fabian, Time, 144.

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overrunning’ of Indian history in works such as Spengler’s and the imperial

overrunning of territories by the colonizing European.16 In both cases, time is what

Fabian calls an ‘ideologically construed [instrument] of power’.17

Lewis’s hints that Spengler’s concepts of the historical and the ahistorical are used as

ideological weapons in a form of temporal colonialism, and Fabian’s argument that a

similar denial of coevalness is endemic to anthropology, indicate that the questions of

time and historical time are central to the politics of colonialism and postcolonialism.

They show that Osborne’s notion of a politics of time within modernity extends

importantly to questions of colonialism and postcolonialism.18 Accepting this

position, one might ask: is there an analogous politics of time in literary modernism?

How might such a politics play itself out in terms of the literary text? Are there forms

of temporality within literary modernism that resist or subvert colonialist historical

schemes and their concomitant ideologies?

Such questions could, I suggest, be pursued profitably within the remit of the ‘new

modernist studies’. Some of the most salient features of this recent critical movement,

as identified by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, are the spatial and temporal

expansion of the boundaries of modernism, and the use of transnational approaches,

which render a version of modernism very different from the older, ‘international’

model.19 It is important to note that this thesis does not form part of the new

modernist studies. By concentrating on three canonical writers, it has not taken part in

either the spatial or the temporal expansion of modernism. Indeed, such a 16 Lewis, Time, 214. 17 Fabian, Time, 144. 18 See Osborne, Politics of Time, 16-7, 199. 19 Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA, 123/3 (2008), 737-48, 737, 739.

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conservative choice of writers arguably retrenches rather than disrupts the existing

modernist canon.20 Nor has it adopted a transnational approach (of which Mao and

Walkowitz distinguish three main varieties). It has not, for instance, sought to exploit

new transnational reading strategies, such as Susan Friedman’s method of ‘cultural

parataxis’, or Jessica Berman’s use of a ‘transnational optic’.21 Nevertheless, this

study does provide a useful framework for theorizing the new forms of temporality

which are being revealed by the recently-expanded scope of the new modernist

studies.

Mary Lou Emery has shown how the newly-expanded spatial reach of modernist

studies has the potential to reveal new forms of time and temporality. As she puts it,

‘[t]he recent emphasis on space in modernist studies takes us back to time, or rather,

to newly modern times’.22 In particular, work in the emergent field of Caribbean

modernist studies has highlighted new forms of temporality. Scholars in this field

have explored the Caribbean as a site of what Homi Bhabha calls ‘contra-modernity’,

and what Paul Gilroy has called a black Atlantic ‘counterculture of modernity’; in

doing so, they have revealed what Emery calls ‘contramodern temporalities’,

including the sedimented and cumulative times identified by Ian Baucom.23 The

approach to modernist time undertaken in this thesis could be extended to an

20 For instance, in terms of temporal boundaries, all the writing addressed here falls within what Mao and Walkowitz call the ‘core period of about 1890 to 1945’ (‘New’, 739). 21 Mao and Walkowitz, ‘New’, 738-9; Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Cultural Parataxis and Transnational Landscapes of Reading: Towards a Locational Modernist Studies’, in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (eds), Modernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 35-52, 37; Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 30. 22 Mary Lou Emery, ‘Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary’, in Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 48-77, 48. 23 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 6; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 36; Emery, ‘Caribbean’, 52; Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 24-5, 311-33.

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investigation of such contramodern temporalities. How does historical time appear

within the wider spheres of literature which are being addressed by the new modernist

studies? And what are the politics of these different forms of time in colonial and

postcolonial contexts?

Existing approaches within the new modernist studies suggest in more concrete form

how such questions might be pursued. For example, in a colonial context, Edwige

Tamalet Talbayev has shown how the writings of the Algerian Berber Jean El

Mouhoub Amrouche explore a form of temporality which seeks both to establish

coevality between Berber and French cultures by enunciating a multiple, shared

present of synchronicity, and to disrupt French historiographic models, thereby

disengaging a local form of modernity from Eurocentric historicist narratives of

global development.24 Or again, in postcolonial contexts, Jahan Ramazani has

explored how African poets such as Christopher Okigbo and Caribbean poets such as

Kamau Brathwaite have reworked Euromodernist apocalypses for their ambivalent

visions of the historical rupture of modernity.25

By replacing Kern’s conception of modernity with that of Osborne, this thesis has

provided a promising framework for theorizing such approaches, and for future

investigations into what Emery has identified as the ‘new and modern times’ which

are being revealed by modernist studies.26 Kern’s older framework is ill-equipped to

support such investigations. Indeed, the question of the politics of historical time can

barely be raised within his Bergsonian opposition between public and private time.

24 Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, ‘Berber Poetry and the Issue of Derivation: Alternate Symbolist Trajectories’, in Global Modernisms, 81-108, 87, 82. 25 Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 106-8. 26 Emery, ‘Caribbean’, 48.

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Moreover, his notion of the public time of modernity implicitly forecloses the

possibility of any forms of temporal resistance in colonial and postcolonial contexts

other than an affirmation of ‘private time’. By contrast, the framework adopted in this

thesis allows the possibility that there are a competing ranges of temporalizations of

history in colonial and postcolonial literatures, and that historical time becomes a site

of political contestation in such literatures. To pursue such a possibility, within the

sphere of the new modernist studies or beyond, would form a continuation of the

enterprise undertaken in this thesis: the (re)assessment of the politics of modernist

time.

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